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An 
Estimate of Shakespeare 



By 

John A. IVIcClorey, S. J. 

St. Louis University 



SCHWARTZ, KIRWIN & FAUSS 
NEW YORK 






Copyright, 1918, by 
Schwartz, Kirwin & Fauss 



FEB 27 1918 

©C1.A481842 



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PREFACE 

The author of this book wishes to acknowledge 
his indebtedness to Bradley, Dowden, and sev- 
eral other writers on Shakespeare and dramatic 
poetry. 

He resorted to them to substantiate and com- 
plement his own ideas in drawing up a lecture on 
Shakespeare, of which the present publication is 
a development. 

As the lecture was largely made up of matter 
taught by the writer in the Junior English Class 
of St. Louis University, it is hoped that the fol- 
lowing pages will be of use to professors and 
students of Junior English. 

In the composition of "An Estimate of Shake- 
speare" the requirements of the Junior English 
Class have been especially but not exclusively 
kept in view. Hence it is thought that for pro- 
fessors and students of lower classes of English, 
and indeed for readers of Shakespeare beyond 
the pale of College and High School, the "Esti- 
mate" will not be devoid of interest and profit. 

The Author. 

St. Louis University, 
July3i, 1917. 



CONTENTS 

Part I 
SHAKESPEARE IN GENERAL 

PAGE 

I Poet of Nature . 7 

II Poet of the Preternatural .... 17 

III Creator of Woman's World .... 21 

IV The Myriad-Minded 28 

V Poet of Miraculous Power of Expres- 

sion 32 

Part II 

SHAKESPEARE AND TRAGEDY 

I Representation of Providence ... 43 

II Male Characters . 49 

III Tragic Causality in Shakespeare . . 55 

IV Shakespeare and the Improbable . . 58 

V Dramatic Action, Conflict, Climax, and 

Catastrophe 64 

VI Irony, Atmosphere, and Omens ... 72 

VII Unities, Borrowed Plots, Suicide . . 7S 

VIII Inarticulate Eloquence 83 

IX The Art, Morality and Emotional Effect 

of Tragedy 88 



An Estimate of Shakespeare 

PART I 
SHAKESPEARE IN GENERAL 

I. POET OF NATURE 

Before taking up the particular study of Shake- 
speare as a writer of tragedies, we shall engage in a 
general consideration of some of his more prominent 
characteristics. 

A pretty fair estimate of Shakespeare can be 
formed by analyzing the meaning of four or five 
phrases commonly applied to him. He has been set 
apart by universal acclaim as the poet of nature, the 
poet of the preternatural, the creator of woman's 
world, the myriad-minded, and the poet of miracu- 
lous power of expression. 

He is a poet of nature in the sense tha't the heart 
of nature was clearly revealed to him. The ''ser- 
mons in stones and books in running brooks" of 
"As You Like It," he himself had intently listened 
to and read. Woods were voluble, every leaf had 
a tongue, the tumultuous sounds of the sea to him 
were articulate, and the earth and sky which to 
most men are pages written with invisible ink were 
inscribed for Shakespeare in letters of crimson, 
purple and gold. 

But the naturalness of Shakespeare means more 
than this ; and the further meaning of the word we 
can gather by considering how he followed the lead 
of the Renaissance. 

The Renaissance was a return in art to the merely 
7 



8 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

natural ideals of Rome and Greece. It was a 
Catholic movement, inaugurated and carried to ful- 
fillment by the popes. The picture of Nicholas V 
going about his court, offering purses of gold to 
literary men for translations of the classics, is 
familiar to readers of church history. Pius II, Jul- 
ius II and Leo X followed his example of encour- 
agement with marvelous results. The spirit of the 
Renaissance penetrated into France and the Nether- 
lands and thence worked its way to England. It 
was fostered there by Erasmus and Thomas More 
and a few years later received its full development 
among the Elizabethan dramatists. These men — 
Marlowe, Peele, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, 
Ben Jonson and Shakespeare — read the classics, 
either in the original or in translations, learned to 
admire portrayals of natural beauty wrought by the 
ancients, and themselves became exponents of the 
sweetness and power of nature and man. It is just a 
bit presumptuous therefore for Protestant writers 
to point to Shakespeare as the work of the Refor- 
mation! He was the child of the Renaissance. 

Accordingly, he differs radically from the poets 
of the ages of faith who preceded him. 

The view that the Middle Ages were dark is grad- 
ually disappearing from the Protestant mind. And 
well it may ! For the fine arts flourished centuries 
before the Reformation. Poetry was not behind 
sculpture, painting and architecture. St. Francis' 
**Hymn of the Creatures" was highly praised by the 
aesthetic Matthew Arnold. St. Francis however had 
two sons in religion who surpassed him as poets. 
One of them wrote the "Stabat Mater" and the 



POET OF NATURE 9 

Other the "Dies Irse," poems which even in the esti- 
mation of non-CathoHc critics are comparable to the 
best lyrics of profane literature. The "J^su Dulcis 
Memoria," the two hymns of the Holy Ghost and 
the **Lauda Sion Salvatorem" of St. Thomas need 
no panegyrist. At the head however of all the re- 
ligious poetry of those centuries are the "Inferno," 
"Purgatorio" and 'Taradiso" of Dante. 

Now the characteristic of this class of poetic 
work is religiousness. St. Francis, St. Bernard, 
Dante and the authors of the morality and mystery 
plays drew their inspiration from the supernatural. 
Revelation lent them material. Faith was the foun- 
dation upon which they reared their art. They rep- 
resented God as the Rewarder of the good and the 
Punisher of the evil in this and the next world. 
Shakespeare stands out in striking contrast to them 
in that he does not draw his inspiration from Rev- 
elation, he is not a poet of Faith, he circumscribes 
his vision with the circle of mortality, beginning 
with birth and ending with death, and he views men 
and women in the light of experimental knowledge 
acquired in this world. In a word, he is mundane 
and natural, merely human and temporal. 

This characterization however needs to be quali- 
fied and explained. We do not affirm then that 
Shakespeare disbelieved in the truths of Faith; he 
only did not advert to them. He did not doubt nor 
deny Revelation ; he only refrains from referring to 
it. Therefore, no normal man can rise from the 
reading of Shakespeare an infidel or sceptic. The 
sorrows of heroes and heroines in the catastrophes 
of his plays are not the cold stony griefs of men and 



10 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

women who look forward to a vacuity after death : 
and the emotions aroused in a reader or spectator, 
though painful, do not degenerate into pessimism. 
The catastrophes of Lear, Romeo and Juliet and 
Othello, for instance, are almost universally admit- 
ted to have an elevating effect. They are not 
touched by the blight of morbid disbelief. When 
w^e come to those terrific finales we are deeply 
moved ; but the sorrow has not a tincture of despair. 
It is rather accompanied by admiration and love. 
Our hearts contract with pain, but they also expand 
with magnanimous feelings. In particular, we see 
his women in ruin, but triumphant in it. Death glo- 
rifies their beauty of character and our souls are 
dilated at the sight. Were death the "be all and end 
all" in their view of life they could not die as they 
do and we could not feel about them as we do. 

But, though Shakespeare does not question nor deny 
the next life, neither does he advert to it as a rule in 
the substance of his tragedies. In some of his plays 
of English history which represent the days of Faith 
ideas of Faith abound. Even in his tragedies inci- 
dental flashes of Faith lighten the page; and in 
"Hamlet" and "Macbeth" the presence of the spirit 
of Faith is more than merely incidental. But in the 

/ substantial part — i.e., in the catastrophe of most of 
his tragedies — he refrains from looking beyond the 

\ boundary of death at the life to come. We never 
think of Romeo and Juliet being happily reunited 
after their tragic end ; though we are not led on by 
the poet to deny or question the union. The loss of 
Cordelia to Lear is not represented as being fol- 
lowed by her eternal restoration to him; although 



POET OF NATURE II 

such a delightful sequel is not doubted nor denied. 
Our hearts are not exhilarated by the thought of 
heaven where all the wrongs endured here by hero 
and heroine are righted ; nor on the other hand are 
we depressed by the idea that no final readjust- 
ment of earthly wrongs is possible. We are allowed 
by the poet simply to see sufferings sweetly or hero- 
ically borne on earth, no reference being made to an 
after-world of happiness. 

Of course this is a nice distinction between non- 
advertence to heavenly truth and denial of it. Per- 
haps the distinction may seem to some at first sight 
too nice : in fact only imaginary. But I am confident 
that a close analysis of one's emotions at the end of 
a Shakespearean tragedy, and of the tragic factors 
productive of them, will justify the distinction. No 
reader is fully satisfied on finishing a play, as he 
would be in case the light of heavenly joy were let 
in to dissipate the shadows of the doleful finale. 
The villain, it is true, always partially justifies the 
governance of a good Providence by his fall. Some 
able and virtuous persons always survive the ruin, 
to carry on the good work left undone by hero and 
heroine and hampered by the evil geniuses of the 
play. The destruction of the amiable figures of the 
tragedy in most cases may be largely attributed to 
faults of their own, and may not, therefore, be em- 
ployed by anybody as an indictment of the benev- 
olence of the Power that rules the world. In all 
cases the downfall of the good is mostly the work 
of merely human agencies. These are redeeming 
views of life; but they do not fully satisfy. They 
are only natural and incomplete : and the hopes and 



12 AiN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

aspirations which they engender in our hearts in 
regard to the ultimate righting of earthly wrongs 
and a final soothing of the sufferings of the world 
are halting, groping and uncertain. 

But while complete satisfaction is impossible to 
one closing the pages of a Shakespearean tragedy, 
at the same time, because of the reasons just given, 
cynical or rebellious feelings of infidelity or scepti- 
cism, sprung of an absolute denial or questioning of 
God's Providence and particularly of a future life, 
cannot legitimately be drawn from the catastrophes 
of the great poet. 

Now, Shakespeare is justified in taking a purely 
mundane view of life in his tragedies. Life, it is 
true, particularly Christian life, is, in the real order 
of things, permeated by the truths of eternity. But 
tragedy as an earthly art may be permitted to give 
only a partial view of life. All arts give only par- 
tial views of things. In fact, all ideas, even the most 
truthful, give only partial views of truth. Now un- 
doubtedly life in its purely mundane character is 
worth portraying. For the manifold and intricate 
movements of the heart, its aspirations and hopes, 
its joys and loves and hates, its exaltations and 
titanic griefs, centering around earthly excellence, 
are not beneath a poet's genius. Out of these he can 
weave a thing of beauty albeit only natural. 

Moreover, the very nature of tragedy seems to 
require a nonadvertence to future beatitude. The 
soul of tragedy is the pathetic. Therefore, the more 
pathetic the tragedy, all other things being equal, 
the more nearly it approaches the ideal. Hence the 
propriety of prescinding from considerations which 



POET OF NATURE 1 3 

would suffuse the catastrophe with the radiant light 
of happiness and dissipate clouds of misfortune. A 
martyr's death is not a tragedy but a triumph pre- 
cisely because it is considered by the Faithful in its 
bearing on eternity. We see the sword at the mar- 
tyr's throat, but also the nimbus around his head. 
Choirs of angels await him: and therefore the 
Office of Martyrs is a paean. "Gaudete, exultate et 
laetamini" is the burden of the song. But a tragedy 
is not a triumph and the feelings which it is in- 
tended to elicit are not triumphant. How then, it 
may reasonably be asked, can a writer of tragedies 
do otherwise than refrain from revealing the vision 
of glory in his finales? How can he but show ex- 
clusively the pathos of earthly misfortune in its own 
sombre coloring? Nor can the objection be urged 
that heavenly hope and joy are more healthful to the 
moral man than earthly grief : and therefore they 
ought to be fostered by tragedy. Those feelings are 
more healthful, but the latter is healthful. Faith is 
better than tragedy but tragedy is good. The emo- 
tions which it arouses are refining and inimical to 
selfishness because they are expended upon the 
beauty, greatness and misfortunes of others. Tra- 
gedy teaches us to break through the little circle 
of self-interest and to expand into the lives of 
others. Their interests become our interests ; their 
griefs are shared by ourselves. The tragic KaOapais 
of which Aristotle speaks consists partially in this 
obliviousness to self in presence of others' misfor- 
tunes. And so, though tragedy does not advert to 
eternal truths which tend to make men moral, it does 
nevertheless in a complementary way minister to 



14 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

morality. It is an auxiliary of Revelation. It fits 
us for sympathy with real sufferings in the world 
around us. It is the handmaid of Charity. 

Indeed, if one were to object to tragedy on the 
score of its earthly limitations, he would be obliged 
to decry, on the same principle many other human 
arts whose scope is to portray only human beauty, 
earthly scenes, natural excellence and worldly bear- 
ings. Statuary and painting are admirable, though 
they may be limited to the representation of figure 
and facial expression. Music need not carry a divine 
theme to be true art. Architecture may satisfy itself 
with embodying worldly magnificence without de- 
serving to be condemned. Why, therefore, discoun- 
tenance tragedy because its last act closes with the 
grave ? Why, like Tate wish to exclude the crushing 
catastrophe of Lear because it is unrelieved by a ray 
of joy? Tragedy is tragedy, and it should be taken 
''all in all or not at all." 

So long as men take Shakespeare for what he is 
worth there will be little harm in the cautious study 
of him. As a tragic dramatist he is a natural, 
worldly poet, and nothing more. He sounded the 
depths of human passion, he knew the heart of man 
like a book, he threaded all the mazes of natural 
emotion, following with miraculous precision the 
almost imperceptible changes in the feelings of men 
and women — the sudden starts, the gradual waver- 
ings or quick revulsions. Intuitively he knew, and 
with unerring exactness he has shown us the half- 
hidden motives that impel men to action, the little 
nothings that inspire them, the imaginary obstacles 
that unman them. Given a certain character in a 



POET OF NATURE 1 5 

certain environment, he had an uncanny prophetic 
vision for the outcome ahead. And he knew the 
mind of man as well as his heart. He watched its 
operations — its sudden intuitions of the truth, its 
contemplative broodings over the mysteries of life, 
its multitudinous questionings, its painstaking ad- 
vances along the straight and rigid groove of logical 
inquiry and its pursuit of truth around the outer- 
most horizon of human speculation, where the intel- 
lectual atmosphere is too tenuous to breathe and the 
light of abstraction is too dim for sight ; where elu- 
sive ideas play us tricks, slip away from us, vanish 
into thin air and leave us foiled and disappointed in 
our quest. 

Moreover, delicacy of feeling, gorgeousness of 
imagery, the amenities of life, graciousness of dis- 
position, courtesy of manners and a hundred other 
ingredients of natural, human, worldly life, all ex- 
pressed in language so exuberant that we can hardly 
read him without gradually becoming gold-flecked 
with his borrowed splendor in our own utterances, 
these we can learn from him. But that is all. He 
pretends to nothing more. He is merely a natural 
poet. He has no divine message. He is not a 
teacher of spirituality. He is not a leader on the 
higher paths of supernatural morality. He never 
took to the wings of Dante. He was too reverent 
to essay the "altius canamus," and he would be the 
first to laugh at the canonization with which some 
critics would honor him — men who follow his teach- 
ing as their all in all in life. 

No! If a Christian wishes to learn something 
about his last end and the manner of compassing it, 



l6 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

he ought to read another Book, the Volume of God's 
Word, and Hsten to another voice, the voice of His 
Church. 

Hence the absurdity of a man Hke Tennyson 
dying with a volume of Shakespeare on his breast. 
At the time the story of his death went round, many 
thought that the picture of the modern bard lying in 
the pale moonlight with the book in his hand was 
pathetically beautiful. To true Christians it must 
have seemed absurd; or, rather, it would have 
seemed so had it not been so tragic. The idea of a 
Christian dying thus, as though the earthly book 
were an open sesame to the gates of heaven ! One 
would think that, as a good Protestant, he would 
have preferred the Bible, 



II. POET OF THE PRETERNATURAL 

Although Shakespeare seldom crossed the border- 
land of the supernatural, he explored the mysteries 
of the preternatural world. His soul was keenly 
awake to spirits of the air and sea and earth. He 
believed that there are more things in heaven and 
earth than a materialistic philosophy dreams of. 
Ghosts, witches, fairies, Pucks, Titanias, Ariels and 
Calibans encircled him : and the beauty, mystery and 
terror of this spirit-world are substantial elements 
of his plays. 

The classic poets of old had created a series of 
spirits before him : but their masterpieces were in- 
ferior to his. For while they and their readers en- 
tertained scant belief in the gods and goddesses, 
most of Shakespeare's contemporaries, and perhaps 
the poet himself, accepted the existence of ghosts, 
witches and fairies as a reality. Moreover, even if 
the ancients had considered Olympus a fact, we 
now know that it was pure fiction. Therefore, it 
lacks for us the charm of poetic probability. But 
who would have the hardihood to reject belief in 
ghosts and witches, and who has not felt at times 
a partiality for faith in fairies ? But, aside from the 
question of probability, Shakespeare's preternatural 
creation surpasses that of the ancient poets as a 
work of imagination. The aesthetic appeal of Jupi- 
ter, Juno, Venus and the rest of the celestials is 
gravely marred by their carnal vulgarities. At their 
best they were only a few grades above earthly men 
and women, and at their worst they were several 
grades beneath them in lasciviousness, petty jealousy 
17 



1 8 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

and childish quarrelsomeness. Olympus, with their 
changing moods, resembled a hill of debauch, a nest 
of outlaws and a cradle of testy, grown-up children. 

But who can refrain from feeling unqualified ad- 
miration for the unearthly agencies which Shake- 
speare revealed through the half-drawn veil of necro- 
mancy? Who has not been awed by the majesty of 
buried Denmark, clad in complete steel, revisiting 
the glimpses of the moon, in the dead vast and mid- 
dle of the night, pacing the platform of Elsinore 
with martial stalk, in a land of dim lights and mel- 
ancholy silences ; grizzled, speechless to Horatio and 
the guards, but to Hamlet eloquent in deep mono- 
tone in his tale of earthly crimes and unearthly pris- 
on-house? The crowing of the cock, the matin- 
dimming of glow-worms, the russet morn among the 
dews on the eastern hill, the bitter cold, the heart- 
sickness and fear of the guards, the references to the 
ghastly omens in the streets of Rome and the with- 
drawal of Hamlet with the ghost to the precipice — 
who can be callous to these circumstantial touches 
of fearfulness? It has been said that the play of 
"Hamlet" would be no play without the melancholy 
Dane; it may be affirmed with equal truth that it 
would be but half a play without the Ghost. 

The preternatural influences of the play of "Ham- 
let" are awe-inspiring; those of "Macbeth" are ter- 
rible. The three witches in the dark recesses of a 
cave, leaning over the cauldron steaming with gross 
ingredients, crooning their lyrics of disgust, their 
dark and midnight repulsiveness emphasized by the 
flickering of infernal flames : and the ghost of Ban- 
quo, blood-boltered, with twenty trenched gashes in 



POET OF THE PRETERNATURAL IQ 

his head, marrowless and without speculation in 
his eyes, taking his place at the table's head, while 
Macbeth stands cowering, his hair on end and his 
eyeballs starting from their sockets — who that has 
beheld these horrors can doubt the Plutonian po- 
tency of the poet's conjuring wand? 

The "Midsummer Night's Dream" is a vision of 
delight. The mischievous Puck circling the earth in 
a trice. Cupid letting fly his arrow at the moon 
which still pursued her course in meditation fancy 
free, Titania fighting for the Indian boy, fairies no 
bigger than an agate-stone on the forefinger of an 
alderman, gnomes dancing in tiny circles under the 
moon, sleeping beneath clover leaves, swinging their 
hammocks from little vines, sailing down streams in 
rose-leaves for shallops, fencing with grass-blades 
for rapiers, mounted on beetles for steeds, sailing on 
the backs of butterflies for aeroplanes, stealing 
honey-bags from bees, cropping their waxed legs for 
torches and lighting them at the glow-worms' lamps 
— all these unearthly forms of beauty in miniature, 
made more unearthly and tiny by being placed side 
by side with the huge bully Bottom, are an exhil- 
arating stimulus to our sense of the preternatural. 

Ariel, in "The Tempest," is a distinct and original 
creation of Shakespeare, quite different from the 
ordinary fairies of folk-lore. He has been described 
by DeQuincey as a sprite, compacted of sunset-hues 
and fragrances. He drifts round the mystic isle of 
Prospero like an iridescent gossamer. He comes and 
goes like a fugitive strain of music on a rising and 
falling wind. Not less original in conception is Cali- 
ban, with his paradoxical combination of brutal 



20 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

grossness, servility, intelligence and power of poetic 
expression. 

Finally, nothing in the great Roman play illus- 
trates more powerfully the calm of Brutus and the 
all-pervading influence of Caesar, relentlessly pursu- 
ing him unto death, than the fateful words of Cae- 
sar's ghost: "I shall meet thee at Philippi;" and 
Brutus' laconic answer : ''Well, then, thou wilt meet 
me at Philippi." The words are few, but thrilling ; 
and their potency is increased by the world-weari- 
ness of Brutus, the dreamy touches of Luciana's 
harp-strings, the great Commoner's tenderness for 
the sleepy lad and his quest of comfort in his book 
of philosophy. 

Truly, Shakespeare, the necromancer, has woven 
a tapestry of preternatural figures in the looms of 
an invisible world, without which the undraped 
walls of his palace of art would be only half as 
beautiful as they are. 



III. CREATOR OF WOMAN'S WORLD 

Shakespeare's galaxy of women characters sur- 
prises us with the number and variety of its types. 
Hermione and Perdita, Queen Catharine, Imogen 
and Miranda, JuHet, the two Portias, Viola, Rosa- 
lind and the heroines of the great tragedies, Ophelia, 
Desdemona and Cordelia — how many there are! 
how different and winning ! 

Now, the peculiarity of the Shakespearean wo- 
man is that she does not do nor say much. Never- 
theless her presence is potently felt. Like an atmos- 
phere which cannot be seen but without which we 
cannot live, her influence pervades the plays. She 
is not aggressive, not prominent according to the 
measurement of lines ; yet without her the great 
dramatist's work would be a mutilated remnant. 
Cordelia, for instance, has but about fifty lines in 
the play of "Lear" : yet she is as engrossing a figure 
as the mad King himself. This passive power and 
speechless eloquence render an analysis of their 
characters well-nigh impossible. The most subtle 
influences in real life are always unseen, impalpable, 
silent and retiring, and therefore difficult of appre- 
hension and incapable of being formally described. 
The charm of womanhood is particularly elusive. A 
man's good qualities are towering and plain ; a wo- 
man's defy exact defining. Shakespeare did not at- 
tempt the impossible. He made no exhaustive analy- 
sis of the female soul ; he drew up no list of its traits. 
He simply held up to nature the mirror of instinct- 
ive intuition, caught the images which he himself 
could not wholly understand and showed them to us. 

21 



22 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

But, while we may not entertain the hope of ac- 
quiring an increased knowledge of Shakespearean 
women by direct analysis, we may however make 
an approach to the secret of their charm by attempt- 
ing an answer to a three- fold question which more 
than once has been asked about them : Why are 
Shakespeare's women superior to his men; why, in 
particular, are the women of his classical plays su- 
perior to the men of those plays ; and how account 
for the superiority of his women to the women of 
the Greek tragedians ? 

The superiority implied in the first question may, 
I imagine, be presumed. It has so often been as- 
serted without being questioned that it may be taken 
as a fact. Personally, I have no difficulty in admit- 
ting it. But the explanation of the fact is not as 
evident as the fact itself. Indeed, a satisfactory ex- 
planation would be tantamount to a thorough under- 
standing of Shakespeare's female creations, which 
it was said above is impossible. However, a tenta- 
tive reasoning may be essayed. I would suggest 
three or four probable explanations without taking 
the responsibility of making a choice among them. 

Can it be that the poet's women are more amiable 
than his men because women in real life are more 
amiable than men? An affirmative answer to the 
question would please a certain very important por- 
tion of the human race; but whether it would ex- 
press the unmixed truth may perhaps be open to 
question. 

Can it be that the poet, as a man, took for granted 
many gracious traits in the sex which a woman 
would question? "Distance lends enchantment to 



CREATOR OF WOMAN S WORLD 23 

the view"; and the psychological distance between 
sex and sex clothes each for the other in charming 
hues. If Shakespeare had been a woman, would 
womanhood have lost some of its enchantment for 
him, and would he not have gazed on man with a 
more wondering eye and depicted him in more 
glowing colors? 

Perhaps the poet in drawing feminine portraits so 
splendidly was impelled by a spirit of gallantry. In 
a great tragedy the catastrophe must be partially the 
outcome of an interior losing conflict between the 
hero or heroine's better and worse self. Shakespeare 
could have made the moral delinquency of heroines 
accountable for the final ruin. Did he refrain from 
laying the burden of grave faults of character and 
conduct upon them because he was a chivalric gentle- 
man? He marred the moral perfection of his men 
with yawning flaws ; he allowed his women to retain 
their integrity of soul. Are we to account for this 
unequal distribution of blameworthiness by his cour- 
teous regard for the other sex ? 

Or may it be said that women fare so well at his 
hands because they are beautiful and emotional in 
character? A man at his best is strong; a woman 
at her best is beautiful. A man may have a beauti- 
ful character and a woman a strong one ; but I would 
hazard the view that strength of character is more 
characteristic of men, and beauty of character is 
more proper to women. Now, poetry deals with the 
beautiful; not precisely with the true, like philoso- 
phy, nor with the strong; and a poet is in his ele- 
ment while contemplating beauty in any form and 
while elaborating his copies of it; but he is not at 



24 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

his best in dealing with the strong. Hence Shake- 
speare's poetic genius found more apt material for 
its exercise in women than in men. 

Again, man is thoughtful; woman emotional. I 
am far from saying that men are without emotion 
and women without thought. But in examining the 
twofold division of human gifts, thought, I believe, 
is found to be more kin to the souls of men and 
emotion to the souls of women. Neither is the con- 
trast intended to be in any way derogatory to either 
sex. Now, as philosophy is the embodiment of 
thought, poetry is the embodiment of emotions. It 
is the art of imagination and feeling expressed 
in language: it postulates abundant sentiment 
in its subject-matter; and therefore the great dra- 
matic poet found woman more native to his cre- 
ative hand and took more delight in following and 
portraying the movements of her soul than man's. 

Finally, can the special requirements of tragic 
poetry and woman's special capacity for suffering 
be invoked as the explanation of the high character 
of Shakespeare's tragic heroines ? Pathos is the soul 
of tragedy: for tragedy aims at representing the 
beauty of suffering. Epic poetry appeals to our ad- 
miration by setting human beings before us doing 
great things ; but tragic poetry appeals to our sym- 
pathy by setting them before us, enduring great mis- 
fortunes. Now, men are seen to their best advan- 
tage in the thick of action and, therefore epic bards 
invariably select men to carry on the plot of their 
poems. But women actuate their highest possibili- 
ties of character under the pressure of irremediable 
adversity. Hence tragic poets choose women to glo- 



CREATOR OF WOMAN S WORLD 25 

rify their catastrophes ; and Shakespeare, as a mat- 
ter of human necessity had to make the passion and 
death of his heroines more poignantly captivating 
than the undoing of his heroes. 

In answering the second question, I shall refer to 
an historic fact. The heroines of Shakespeare's 
plays of antiquity are more admirable than the 
heroes of those plays because they are his own 
poetic creation; and they had to be such because 
the status of women in olden times was not favor- 
able to the development of heroines in fact. What- 
ever social advantages woman now possesses she 
owes to Christianity. Before the Christian era she 
was regarded as chattels. Indeed, a more degrading 
character was her lot. We gaze across the superb 
stage of ancient history; we are astonished at its 
panoramic splendor; but we observe that the chief 
actors were men. Great women were conspicuous 
for their absence. But when God made a woman 
His mother He raised all other women with her. 
He made them queens of the fireside, angels of the 
home. He made maidenhood a glory and placed a 
nimbus around the brow of wife and mother. The 
knight-errant's dream of ideal womanhood was of 
Christian origin ; and the social courtesies prevalent 
among modern men in regard to women can be 
traced back to the great courtesy which God conde- 
scended to show to Mary in asking her to be His 
mother. 

A civilization prolific of great men but barren of 
great women was not propitious to the genius of the 
Poet in quest -of womanly ideals. What thecivilization 
failed to afford his own imagination supplied ; and 



26 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

thus the historic dearth became a poetic advantage. 
For while heytook the heroes of Rome with their 
faults and all as he found them and introduced them 
unchanged ihto his plays, he had to fall back upon 
his superb creative power in fashioning classical 
heroines. These, therefore, historically dwarfed in 
comparison with their fellow-men, dramatically out- 
shine them. The lasciviousness of the Roman wo- 
men could not be dramatized without engendering 
disgust : so Shakespeare embodied an imaginary ma- 
tronly morality in Portia, j Cleopatra, as an historic 
fact, could appeal only to the sodden soul of a roue ; 
Shakespeare partially transformed the jaded origi- 
nal with the talismanic touch or his art. 

In answering the third question I shall invoke the 
authority of DeQuincey. His name ought to be in 
honor in the present consideration, as he was emi- 
nently capacitated to pass judgment on the compara- 
tive merits of Greek and English dramatic poetry. 
He read Greek fluently at the age of twelve and, like 
Ben Jonson, loved Shakespeare intensely. His pref- 
erence for the Shakespearean heroine is unqualified 
and his illustrations of her superiority as an artistic 
creation to the handiwork of Sophocles, Euripides 
and ^schylus are most emphatic. Their women, he 
says, are a group of marble statuary ; his women are 
glowing with the warmth of real life. 

According to DeQuincey, the explanation of this 
contrast may be found in the pronounced differences 
between Greek and modern life. The women of 
Greece led their lives in seclusion like women of the 
Oriental seraglios. Their isolation left a grave va- 
cancy in the social and civil life of the community. 



CREATOR OF WOMAN'S WORLD 27 

and also prevented them from developing the best 
elements of female character. The Greek dramatist 
accordingly looked around him in vain in the open 
ways of the world for feminine forms of beauty; 
and in the walled spaces of retirement found only a 
colorless monotone of half-developed womanhood. 
And even when some civil catastrophe broke open 
the doors of feminine privacy and cast forth the in- 
mates into the reaches of the general gaze the dra- 
matist still labored under the disadvantage of having 
to make an unsatisfactory choice. For the women 
who would have strength enough to survive such a 
civil storm long enough to be caught and imaged in 
the mirror of a play would be of the masculine type. 
Their qualities of soul would be a mere repetition 
of the qualities of men. Now, the chief charm of the 
sexes lies in their differences; and women are en- 
gaging not in that they are like men, but in that they 
are unlike them. Antigone is grand, but she is a 
man; Ismene is not grand, but she is at any rate a 
woman, and if her environment had been less diffi- 
cult she might have developed and displayed an ami- 
able womanly character. 

But in the Dispensation of Christianity women 
live out in the world side by side with men as well 
in times of calm as of storm; they are free to de- 
velop without strain Into their highest types along 
the lines of their own sex : many of them have 
availed themselves of their opportunities; Shake- 
speare saw the vision of their distinctive feminine 
beauty; he glorified it still more by his magic and 
left us an album in which he who runs may read 
the Poet's notion of what women ought to be. 



IV. MYRIAD-MINDED 

When critics characterize Shakespeare as the 
myriad-minded they mean to say, I suppose, 
that he possessed the diversified powers of 
many minds; that he took a marvellous number 
of divergent views of life and expressed them 
with profuse variations of style and imagery. 
And, indeed, can even the casual reader fail to 
observe his Protean impartiality to a thousand pos- 
sibilities of mental attitude? He was no specialist 
in the selection of themes. All forms of humanity 
and nature made their appeal to his accommodating 
mind with apparently equal degrees of attractive- 
ness. When for instance I read Hamlet I imag- 
ine that Shakespeare must have spent his life 
exclusively brooding in melancholy silence over the 
mysteries of the world and man and life and death. 
I turn to Romeo and Juliet and I see his cheeks 
crimsoned with the flush of young love; in his 
eyes the light of ecstatic joy, in his bearing the 
irresponsibility of a thoughtless career. In Lear he 
appears to have made a lifelong study of madness; 
in Macbeth he is a specialist in observing phases 
of conscience. Julius Csesar is an embodiment of 
his whole-hearted admiration for the imperial gran- 
deur of Rome. In the English historical plays he 
cares only for the glory of Britain. With Falstaif 
broad fun in a tavern is the only thing worth while 
in life. With Viola, Rosalind, Bassanio's Portia, 
Perdita, the fresh poetic beauty of life engrosses 
him. He addresses us through Antony, and we 
feel that Demosthenes never spoke better. He 

2% 



MYRIAD-MINDED 29 

reveals the loveliness of hill and valley, stream, sky 
and sea, and we imagine him wedded to nature 
alone and never wearied with gazing at her face. 
Most men can do only one or two things well; he 
is an adept at many. Perhaps Carlyle has described 
as forcibly, Tennyson undoubtedly has written as 
smoothly ; Byron is his match in rhetorical forcef ul- 
ness; Shelley was as ethereal in his lyrics; Keats as 
gorgeous in phrasing, Scott as romantic, Coleridge 
as weird, Milton as sublime. But they were spe- 
cialists in their particular respective spheres of 
poetic expression. He was a specialist in none of 
them, or rather, a specialist in all of them. 

A notable effect of the universality of Shake- 
speare's genius is its freedom from oddities. Spe- 
cialization, tends to develop idiosyncracies, and the 
peculiarities of so many English writers is an apt 
illustration of this general principle. Their charms 
are marred by strange biases because they consid- 
ered themselves privileged on account of their 
exalted gifts to be outlandish with impunity. Dr. 
Johnson, Carlyle, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, De 
Quincey, Poe, Wordsworth, Goldsmith, Gray, 
ColHns and Milton as a prose-writer were not 
normal men, whereas the sublime gift of Shake- 
speare was his common sense and balance of mind 
which enabled him to direct his course along the 
beaten highway of thought and feeling with very 
few erratic excursions. Hence, whereas a read- 
ing of them is often accompanied by a sense of 
remoteness from the plain realities of life, the pre- 
dominant thought pulsing through the study of 
Shakespeare is: How true all this is; how like the 



30 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

world of fact! The transition of our minds from 
the sphere of actuality to the sphere of his poetry 
is easy and natural. No preparatory rearrange- 
ment of mental attitude to fit in with an unwonted 
group of ideas and impressions is demanded. We 
feel as little strain in understanding him as in 
enjoying a summer day, a sunset or home. And 
when we part with him to return to our accustomed 
environment of objective things, a sense of parting 
is hardly felt, so kin is his creation to God's. He 
never presumed to attempt an improvement on 
nature by substituting for its truths spurious vari- 
ants, quaint interpretations, original colorations, 
subjective rearrangements of them. He trusted for 
effect not in imaginative legerdemain, however 
startling in its charming tricks ; but in the elo- 
quence of sincere interpretation. He was con- 
cerned not with what he might possibly add to the 
splendor of the world from the sources of his splen- 
did mind, but with the task of making his mind a 
transparent window that men might see through it 
the uncommon beauty of common things. They 
had been blinded to the loveliness of nature and 
man by the film of familiarity ; he would teach them 
that the ordinary is marvellous. Why should they 
go afar in quest of beauty, when eye-opening won- 
ders like fellow men and women were around 
them; when the sky above them and the earth at 
their feet defied description? Originality has com- 
monly been accounted a mark of literary genius. 
Shakespeare was original, but his originality con- 
sisted in undoing one of the works of original sin. 
Through Adam's fall man's vision of truth was 



MYRIAD- MINDED 3I 

dimmed. God, humanity and nature became three 
closed books. Shakespeare reopened at least two 
of them". His gospel was the preaching of two 
truths as old as the Garden of Eden. And he is 
greater than the common run of mortals, not in that 
he contemplated the recondite and unusual, but in 
that he saw the ordinary in a thousand forms more 
clearly and profoundly than they and had the power 
of manifesting his vision with miraculous ease, ver- 
satility, fidelity, comprehensiveness, intensity and 
gorgeous profusion of speech. 



V. POET OF MIRACULOUS POWER OF 
EXPRESSION 

Profusion is perhaps the most prominent feature 
of Shakespeare's style. Like a perennial fountain he 
poured forth from the springs of his soul a full flood 
of language saturated with thought ; and he exulted 
in his abundance. His mind bristled with ideas, his 
heart glowed with emotions, his imagination was 
splendid with imagery ; and for every thought, emo- 
tion and image he had his expression. Ani even 
when only one thought was engaging him his words 
were multiple. For he analyzed that thought into 
its elements, contemplated it from various points of 
view, compared it with other ideas, saw the points 
of similarity and difference ; and then vocalized the 
whole cluster of observations. The play of ''Ham- 
let" in particular is an embodiment of power of 
speech. Soldiers, statesmen, kings and many of the 
other sorts of men that carry most of his plots are 
naturally sparing in words. Shakespeare had to ac- 
commodate himself to the requirements of their reti- 
cent characters. But Hamlet the philosopher and 
poet to whom speech was as necessary as breathing 
gave him his opportunity and he seized it with an 
onrush of eloquence. 

One would not expect a fine discrimination in the 
choice of words in a vocabulary of spontaneous 
abundance. And yet the nicest adaptation of ex- 
pression to idea goes along with Shakespeare's pro- 
fusion. When he broods his language hangs heavily 
around his thoughts. When his mind breaks out in 
sudden intuitions of the truth his words leap with 

32 



POET OF EXPRESSION 33 

it. When he grows passionate his language glows 
and rushes with his feelings. Indeed, it is impos- 
sible for an elocutionist to render such rapid pas- 
sages otherwise than rapidly. The balanced sen- 
tences of Brutus' speech are a replica of the Ro- 
man's balancing, philosophic mind. The words of 
Lorenzo to Jessica, in the last act of "The Merchant 
of Venice," are as velvety as the Italian night they 
describe. The majestic march of the blank verse 
in Othello's speech before the senate becomes the 
heroic proportions of the speaker's soul. The rug- 
ged compactness of innumerable passages in ** Mac- 
beth" fit in with the compressed and tense forceful- 
ness of the whole action. The ghost in ''Hamlet" is 
not more solemn than the heroics in which he speaks. 
The language of Caesar is always that of a world- 
conqueror ; and the address of Henry V to his troops 
before the battle of Agincourt vibrates with the re- 
pressed energy of his prepared soul. 

Did Gray in his years of elaboration over the 
phrasing of the "Country Churchyard" ever fit the 
phrase to the idea more happily than Shakespeare 
when he threw off carelessly expressions like these : 
"The majesty of buried Denmark," 'Tn the high and 
palmy days of Rome, a little ere the mightiest Julius 
fell," "The sheeted dead did squeak and gibber 
through the streets of Rome," "In the dead vast and 
middle of the night," "His sovereign reason like 
sweet bells jangled out of tune," "Gilding pale 
streams with heavenly alchemy," "O thou weed, who 
art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet that the sense 
aches at thee," "Nothing became him in his life like 
the leaving it," "My way of life is fallen into the 



34 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

sere, the yellow leaf," "Painting the lily and gilding 
refined gold ?" Appropriate phrasings come upon us 
so thick and fast that the glory of his utterances are 
dimmed by their own light. We need to read a 
book of quotations to appreciate by contrast the su- 
perior fitness of his expressions to the best efiforts of 
other poets. 

I implied in the last paragraph that Shakespeare 
composed in an ofif-hand manner : and so, I am per- 
suaded, he did. There is every evidence of sponta- 
neity in his plays. I cannot imagine him as a patient 
elaborator of style. No doubt he thought deeply be- 
fore putting pen to paper, but when once settled on 
his characters, theme and plan, he must have written 
with lightning speed. Innumerable peculiar colloca- 
tions of words could not possibly have been the out- 
come of deliberate selection. Such verbal juxtapo- 
sitions never existed before his time. They were 
stricken off according to the exigencies of a mind 
impatient of delay in choosing the traditional phrase 
or in coining a new one in accordance with ac- 
cepted artificial laws. No other joiner of words 
could have made such incongruous pieces fit together 
into a consistent mosaic. "Coigne of vantage," 
*'High-battled Caesar," ''The itch of Antony's affec- 
tion nicked his captainship," *'A thousand soldiers 
have on their riveted trim," ''Wouldst thou be 
windowed in great Rome?" Such expressions, so 
unusual and yet so telling, were the first that came 
to his hurrying mind and he waited for no other. 
From the first act the finale beckoned to him, and he 
hurried to it without taking time to measure his steps 
too nicely. If a man of lesser powers snatched at 



I'OKT or I'.XI'RKSSFON 35 

words haphazard in an onward rush of thoughts 
a hodge-pod^'c would result. Most of us must raise 
ourselves lahoriously to a level of high expres- 
sion and then he very careful not to fall. P.ut h(^ 
dwelled normally on elevated planes of language 
and needed not to dread much the danger of sinking 
through carelessness. That he did sinl< soniclinics, 
however, is evident from the occasional ohscurily 
and clumsiness of his style. 

1 lad he ])QQn more circumspect in choosing words 
undouhtedly he would have avoided these (laws ; hut 
he would also have sacrificed a great portion of his 
freshness and vitality. A cool judgment is liahle to 
be wedded to a cold style: and the pauses of judicial 
selection too often involve a stoppage of the stream 
of words. Few men can he meticulous in the choice 
of expressions without loss of glow and fluency. 
Even Newman (be it said, salvo meliori judicio) 
suffers as a writer from the sense he creates in his 
readers' minds of a laborious effort to write nothing 
beside the mark nor to ])ennit the slightest flaw to 
mar the perfect contour of his style, ile is never 
sublimely carried away ; his thoughts are superb, but 
always under rein. One almost wishes that he were 
not habitually so masterful. One would be relieved 
to see him lounge at times: a strain would be lifted 
and a sense of freedom break across his i)age. I'ut 
because Shakespeare was swift and informal in ex- 
])ressing his thoughts his language tingles with life: 
a rare tang and verve thrill through his lines and a 
delightful abandon characterizes his luxuriant mul- 
tiplication of images. 

The abandon of Shakespeare's style is exemplified 



36 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

in his use of invective, humorous and serious. Noth- 
ing surpasses the jolly violence v^ith which Falstaff 
and Prince Hal throw themselves into their bouts of 
name-calling. They coin and exchange epithets with 
great gusto. They pour forth vituperation till they 
are out of breath, and after a breathing-space go to 
it again with renewed ardor. They seem to have 
memorized dictionaries of abuse in preparation for 
encounters ; and, indeed, they could make additions 
to any dictionary. In "The Taming of the Shrew," 
Petruchio relieves his feelings off and on with an 
outburst of complimentary phrases. One wonders, 
in reading these and like passages where under the 
sun the poet could have found so many outlandish 
forms of abusive speech.' 

But his serious invective is more startling. The 
two soliloquies of Hamlet: '*Oh, what a peasant 
slave am I !" and '*How all occasions do inform 
against me !" are exaggerated forms of self-condem- 
nation in which the prince takes a morbid pleasure 
in pouring out the vials of a wrathful vocabulary 
upon his own head. ''The devil damn thee black, thou 
cream- faced loon! Where gotst thou that goose- 
look ? Go prick thy face and over-red thy fear, thou 
lily-livered boy. Those linen cheeks of thine are 
counsellors to fear. What soldiers, whey-face?" In 
this passage Macbeth mounts to the height of indig- 
nation against the fearfulness of his servant through 
six metaphors of fear. Marullus says to the mob : 
"You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless 
things ! Oh, you hard hearts, you cruel men of 
Rome." But Lear and Timon say things that make 
Marullus seem like a novice in the art of rebuke. 



POET OF EXPRESSION 37 

The pleasure which Shakespeare took in multi- 
plying scathing epithets, he took indeed also, in 
his general use of words. Thought is something 
greater than a vocabulary. But a vocabulary is not 
contemptible. ''Words, words, words" when they 
usurp the place of thought are a bane, but not 
otherwise. At least in literature they are more 
than artificial forms. Scientific words are cold and 
lifeless, merely indispensable evils, without which 
a communication of thought is impossible. The 
scientist would do without them if he could. But 
the literary man delights in words, phrases and sen- 
tences. Anyone with a little experience in writing 
is aware of the keen pleasure of turning expres- 
sions. Half the delight of reading Keats is due to 
his exquisite phraseology. The word-artist finds 
his joy not precisely in his thought nor in his 
expression, but in the luxuriant unfolding of his 
thought into expressions which are its perfect com- 
plement. As Newman says, words are not mere 
outward signs. They are a part of the thought, as 
the voice is of the singer's soul. They flash on the 
page or else only embody a few dead letters of the 
alphabet, according as the author's mind was aglow 
or cold when he wrote. 

Now Shakespeare's words are still swathed for 
us in the atmosphere of his soul and his verse is 
still gold-flecked with his radiant intellect. Have 
we not more than once been stopped at a line of his 
by the magic of its suggestiveness? Have we not 
found ourselves exploring the author's mind, won- 
dering what imspoken things he meant by the 
spoken words? Have we not found a wealth of 



38 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

meaning between the lines? And is not this intui- 
tion for things invisible a proof of the conjuring 
power which a vocabulary has, not in itself, but 
only from the writer's mind with which it is in 
intimate touch? And if this be true, shall we think 
it beneath the great poet's dignity to have revelled 
in words? Rhetoricians have counted the number 
of words employed by various authors and they 
have accorded Shakespeare the first place in fecun- 
dity over men like Macaulay, De Quincey and 
Carlyle — a pre-eminence startling in a writer who 
was under the handicap of some 250 years' priority 
in the growth of the English language. He knew 
the power of words. He loved them as the very 
body of his spiritual conceptions. Next to the ideas 
and emotions which surged through his soul, he 
loved the majesty, the sweetness, the luxuriant pro- 
fusion, the full-toned sonorousness, the quick adapt- 
ability, the nice distinctions and the suggestiveness 
of a perfect vocabulary. 

The suggestiveness of Shakespeare is one of the 
greatest wonders of the man. I do not know 
whether suggestiveness is the right word for my 
meaning. Let me illustrate. The delicious sense 
of beauty and happiness emitted by the garden 
scene of the last act of "The Merchant of Venice" ; 
the feeling of powerlessness to face and answer the 
multitudinous questionings rushing in upon the mind 
for solution from everywhere, which rises from the 
pages of "Hamlet" ; the realization of the unimpas- 
sioned happiness of being in touch with nature, 
which charms the reader of "As You Like It"; the 
mystic pleasure of supposing a world of quaint and 



POET OF EXPRESSION 39 

harmless spirits invisible at our feet and around 
our head which comes upon us out of 'The Mid- 
summer Night's Dream," and the fateful sense of 
the tremendous presence of Caesar in the play of 
that name, dominating careers even after his death, 
for ruin or success — these impressions are not 
definitely conveyed by language; they are breathed 
into us mysteriously by impalpable processes of the 
poet's mind; they may be called the work of sug- 
gestion and they prove Shakespeare to be great. 

The wit of Shakespeare embodied in his puns has 
been a perennial subject of comment. I hold no 
brief for puns. Nevertheless, I submit that there 
are puns and puns. A play on words in which the. 
relationship between idea and idea is hidden from 
all but subtle minds, which conveys a merited dash 
of bitter- irony or mystifies the inquisitive, is a 
keen-cutting rapier-thrust in intellectual repartee. 
Many of the poet's puns are distressing to the 
reader. But explanations can be given. Here and 
there undoubtedly he is only illustrating the fatuous 
sense of fun in obtuse characters. The flat jokes 
of the grave diggers are perhaps excusable on this 
score; and Hamlet's own answers to them may be 
supposed to be only a condescension to their intel- 
lectual capacity. He had an audience too in 
Elizabethan days that required crude entertain- 
ment; he must have despised many of the things 
he wrote to tickle them. Moreover, it seems that 
even the cultured of that period had developed a 
vitiated taste for pert inanities of speech. Shake- 
speare probably caught the disease. Finally, word- 
trifling may have been an inborn fault with him. 



40 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

Nature often mars her best works. Bernard Shaw, 
referring to some of the exchanges of Benedik and 
Beatrice, remarks that the EngHsh mind has never 
been noted for subtlety. 

But when the worst has been said about Shake- 
speare's punning, the truth remains that many of 
his doubhngs of ideas are masterful. No apology 
is in place for passages like these: 

PoLONius — "My lord, would you go out of the air?" 

{Take the air.) 
Hamlet — "Into my grave?" 
PoLONius — "My Lord, I most humbly take my leave of 

you." 
Hamlet — "You cannot take from me anything with which 

I will more gladly part withal." 
PoLONius — "What do you read, my lord?" 
Hamlet — "Words, words, words." 
Hamlet {to Guildenstern) — "Though you can fret me, 

you cannot play upon me." 
Gertrude — "Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended." 
Hamlet — "Mother, you have my father much offended." 
Hamlet — "Is this the fine of his fines to have his fine pate 

filled with fine dust?" 
Hamlet {to the King) — "Drink off this potion. Is thy 

union here? Follow my mother." 

Punning and indeed all of the lighter forms of 
literary expression receive an added value from 
their association with grave ideas. A specialist in 
fun is not to be wondered at for his felicities; for 
an exclusive devotion to any art is expected to pro- 
duce results above the ordinary. But quick transi- 
tions from grave to gay and from gay to grave are 
rare; for they imply a many-sided versatility. 
Shakespeare changes front with astounding sud- 
denness. Indeed, the intermingling of parti-colored 



POET OF EXPRESSION 4I 

scenes in his plays would be disastrous were his 
dexterity not guided by a sublime instinct for 
effect. Perhaps he sometimes fails in mingling 
shine and shadow. But all agree that the stroke 
of genius is apparent in many of his contrasting 
lines and scenes, and I am convinced that appar- 
ently crude and incongruous combinations to which 
exception is often taken justify themselves on closer 
reading as indispensable means to the effect in- 
tended. The drunken porter scene in ''Macbeth," 
the clown scene immediately preceding the death 
of Cleopatra, the mob-vulgarities which prelude the 
sublime speech of Marullus and the emphatic 
earthiness of Bottom and his histrionic craftsmen, 
tangled in a gossamer-route of fairies, are really 
subtle though apparently crude juxtapositions. 
For the horror of Duncan's murder, the sublimity 
of Cleopatra's death, the high eloquence of the 
Roman and the gauzy evanescence of fairyland are 
made more impressive by these opposites. Other 
contrasts are better understood. Mamillius' story- 
telling before the apprehension of Hermione, the 
volubility of the fool at Lear's side in the storm, 
the wild and whirling frivolity of Hamlet after the 
vision of the ghost, Prince Hal's rakishness fol- 
lowed by his kingliness — every reader sees here the 
master's changeful hand combining opposites with 
miraculous dexterity. 

But the producing of effect is not the only ex- 
planation of Shakespeare's contrasting scenes. He 
embodied contraries side by side in his plays, 
because he saw that life taken as a whole is a con- 
fused mass of opposites. He intended his plays to 



42 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

be a living image of life, and therefore he did not 
stop at making combinations at which an over- 
nice sestheticism w^ould be shocked. He was 
not squeamishly artistic, but hearty and strong 
as well as exquisitely delicate. He did not special- 
ize in exotic refinement of portrayal. He would 
rather represent two uncongenial truths than omit 
either of them through a love of artistic consistency. 
He waded into life, ready to portray anything that 
he might meet. Pellucid lake and tempestuous 
ocean ; dreaming valley and rugged cliff ; forest and 
open plain; love, hatred, hope, fear, ecstasy and 
despair, jealousy, ambition, madness; keen intel- 
lectuality and sodden stupidity; courage and cow- 
ardice ; frivolity and gravity ; courtliness and boor- 
ishness ; self-sacrifice and selfishness ; the grandeur 
of antiquity and the dash of modern chivalry — all 
these bulked before him. Another man would 
shrink from approach, or select a portion for 
portrayal, or, attempting all, would be lost in the 
confusion of things. But he rushed into the midst 
of the chaotic mass, seized right and left, separ- 
ated, ordered and represented the whole concrete 
route of truths concretely, and yet so distinctly, 
part by part, that we can study each part at our 
leisure, with the pleasant sense of taking one thing 
at a time. Nature is an organ, and he a skilled 
player. All sounds are in its depths. They can 
come out in massed dissonance or multitudinous 
harmony. He knew the keyboard and all the stops 
and he made his instrument express its one great 
soul through many throats. 



PART II 
SHAKESPEARE AND TRAGEDY 

I. REPRESENTATION OF PROVIDENCE 

Up to the present we have been considering 
characteristics of Shakespeare in general. We may 
now approach the more specific topic of his tragedy. 
The most important and engrossing element of 
Shakespearean tragedy is the representation of 
Providence which the poet offers us. The generality 
of men, captivated as they are by the whirl and gla- 
mor of earthly pursuits, do not appear to interest 
themselves in the influences exerted by a heavenly 
power on their career. But their seeming indiffer- 
ence is not an index of their thoughts. In moments 
of solitude and in times of misfortune questions 
concerning the fact and character of Providence are 
vitally insistent. And though in reading Shake- 
speare they explicitly think of this that and the 
other thing, yet when the full force of his catas- 
trophes overwhelms them, implicitly, almost uncon- 
sciously their inquiring thoughts turn to the char- 
acter of the Power that rules the world. Wherefore 
the question of Shakespeare's representation of 
Providence in tragedy is paramount. 

We shall see later that Providence was repre- 
sented by the Greek tragedians as contradicting the 
freedom of man. Is man free in Shakespeare's tra- 
gedy, and is the influence exerted by the superior 
power upon his career beneficent or malignant? 

43 



44 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

To answer the question more satisfactorily I shall 
first state two extreme views, between which the 
truth is found. Some hold that the poet represents 
Providence as perfectly beneficent and that there- 
fore the reader or spectator experiences a feeling 
of complete satisfaction at the end of the play. 
s Others maintain that he represents Providence as 
malignant, and that for this reason a reader or 
spectator's sentiments are those of hopeless pessi- 
mism, deep chagrin and rebellious hatred of the 
power that so unevenly distributes success and mis- 
fortune among the wicked and deserving. The 
truth is that Shakespearean Providence is not malig- 
nant nor perfectly beneficent. It is imperfectly 
beneficent, and therefore the deep sense of sorrow 
which emanates from the final scenes of defeat and 
death, though far from satisfying to a mind that 
rejoices in the triumph of good, has not a tincture 
of debilitating gloom, moroseness or revolt against 
heaven. 

For the sake of clearness, I shall allow myself the 
luxury of setting up the-proof somewhat formally. 

First, then, the Providence of a Shakespearean 
tragedy is not perfectly beneficent. The ways of 
God in dealing with men cannot be justified without 
reference to the next life. 'The whips and scorns 
of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's con- 
tumely, the law's delay, the insolence of office and 
the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes," 
these and their likes would ofifer material for a less 
favorable commentary on God's care of the good 
but that the thought of a rectifying rearrangement 
of apportionments after death helped the judgment 



REPRESENTATION OF PROVIDENCE 45 

to pronounce in favor of Divine justice and 
benevolence. 

Nor can the objection be urged that virtue is its 
own reward and vice its own punishment even in 
this life. For the gratifying consciousness of virtue 
is not a sufficient return for well-doing and the 
stings of conscience are not an adequate punishment 
for wickedness. Surely hero and heroine would not 
feel themselves adequately remunerated for their 
noble endurance of adversity by a high sense of rec- 
titude unless this were complemented by the hope of 
something after death. 

But Shake'speare does not advert, as a rule, to the 
next life in his tragic catastrophes. This was made 
clear above in the chapter on his naturalness. We 
saw there that the predominant impression left on 
our souls in the last act of a Shakespearean tragedy 
is that of finality. We repeat : the vision of an after- 
life in which the wrongs wrought on earth will be 
rectified is not opened to our gaze. In "Othello," 
"Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," for instance, not even 
a suggestion of the eternal reunion of broken hearts 
is made to alleviate the pressure of the sympathetic 
feelings which we entertain for these victims of mis- 
fortune. 

If the objection be urged : therefore Shakespeare 
is an infidel, we repeat the distinction given above — 
i.e., that non-advertence to a heavenly truth is not 
the same thing as the denial of it. The distinction 
may perhaps seem too nice ; in fact, only imaginary. 
But it is founded on a possibility and a fact. The 
possibility of not adverting to a truth without deny- 
ing or doubting it may be illustrated in a homely way 



46 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

from the art of sculpture. A sculptor does not rep- 
resent the interior organs of a man — his heart, lungs 
and brain; for he is concerned only with his figure 
and face. Who would say that he denies what he 
does not represent ? In like manner a poet can rep- 
resent certain phases of life to the exclusion of other 
phases by a process of non-advertence without being 
involved in the necessity of doubting or denying. 
Now, that Shakespeare actuated that possibility in 
regard to the truth of heaven is evident in the light 
of a reader's emotions at the catastrophe. No reader 
is fully satisfied on closing the book. He would be if 
the light of another world were let in by the poet to 
dissipate the shadows of the doleful finale. But no 
reader is pessimistic and rebellious. He would be 
if that light were extinguished by the spirit of denial 
or doubt in the tragedy. 

But, the possibility and fact of non-advertence 
being admitted, the question may be asked : How can 
a spectator or reader take artistic pleasure in a play 
in which justice is not fully meted out by Provi- 
dence to the deserving ? In answering, I admit that 
the human heart naturally wishes to see justice fully 
done; that justice is not represented as being fully 
done in Shakespeare's tragedy ; and, thirdly, if, dur- 
ing the course of the tragedy, the reader or spectator 
adverted to the fact of injustice, his displeasure at 
the sight would destroy any artistic gratification 
which might otherwise be aroused. But I maintain 
that, if the dramatist be a real artist and his play 
be followed with wrapt attention, the soul of the 
reader will be too full of sympathetic interest in the 
beauty of suffering to advert to its injustice. Only 



REPRESENTATION OF PROVIDENCE 47 

at the completion of the play, when the tense emo- 
tions of the heart will have relaxed, will the mind 
begin to act, perceiving and revolting at the sight of 
crushed nobility of character unavenged on earth. 
But then forces other than tragedy — i.e., Reason 
and Faith — can come in to give assurance of an 
after-life in which the tilted scale-beam of justice 
will be reset. 

Providence, then, as represented in Shakespearean 
tragedy is not perfectly beneficent. 

But neither is it malignant. For, aside from the 
fact that Shakespeare does not exclude the possibil- 
ity of a heavenly readjustment of earthly wrongs by 
positively denying the next life, there are always 
five or six factors in his catastrophes which save the 
partially beneficent character of Providence. Since 
the villain is always punished, therefore Providence 
in directing destinies is certainly not partial to vil- 
lainy. Since some virtuous persons always survive 
the catastrophe to advance the cause of good, there- 
fore Providence is propitious to the worthy. Since 
the destruction of the amiable figures of the tragedy 
in most cases may be largely attributed to faults of 
their own : and in all cases is principally the work of 
human agencies of evil, therefore Providence cannot 
justly be held accountable for the defeat. More- 
over, the sublime heights to which some of his hero- 
ines rise, the beauty of their pathetic submission, 
their love in death, their fortitude force upon us 
the reflection that the supernal Power from which 
such beings proceed must itself be amiable. For, if 
we love God for having given us the loveliness of 
field and mountain, ocean and sky, surely we have 



48 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

a right to conclude with greater cogency to the good- 
ness He manifested in blessing the world with such 
types of womanhood. Therefore, Providence is not 
presented to us in Shakespearean tragedy as a ma- 
lignant force. It is neither perfectly beneficent nor 
malignant. It is imperfectly beneficent, and there- 
fore our feelings on finishing a tragedy are painful 
rather than exultant; but, though painful, yet not 
pessimistic nor rebellious. 



II. MALE CHARACTERS 

An estimate has already been given of Shake- 
speare's female characters in tragedy and comedy. 
The following considerations bear exclusively upon 
his tragic characters, especially his men. When I 
stop to question myself about his great portrayals 
of heroes — Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, Brutus, 
Lear, Coriolanus, Antony and the rest — the first 
thought that comes to me is : how essential they are 
to the plays. Many a good novelist rests his claim 
to recognition on other things than character: e. g., 
on incidents, plot, description and style. A lyric 
poet need have nothing to do with the portrayal of 
character ; for a lyric is an efifusion of emotion and 
thought. And although an epic poet must create 
characters to carry on the action of his epic, his 
main work consists in drawing up and setting forth 
a grand scale of events. It is evident that the Iliad 
and ^neid depend incomparably less on character 
for their effectiveness than a tragedy of Shake- 
speare and incomparably more on big happenings. 
Character-drawing is not wanting in the great 
epics, but character-drawing was not the primary 
purpose in the epic poet's mind; it is not exhaustive 
and does not afford an abundant supply of material 
for analytic study. In some instances it would 
appear that the epic poet was only intent on the 
glorification of some abstract quality, which he 
encompassed in a form of flesh and blood to make 
a concrete appeal. Thus Achilles is the brave, 
Ulysses the wise, Menalaus the eloquent. In other 
cases, an epic character's only recommendation is 

49 



50 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

his physical strength. The hero of the ^neid is 
merely "pius ^neas," and the colorlessness of Vir- 
gil's ''fortemque Gyan, fortemque Cloanthum/' has 
made the names of those two adventurers bywords. 
Satan in "Paradise Lost" is of course a great char- 
acter but the other demons and the good angels 
are little more than names. But the heroes of 
Shakespearean tragedy are many and varied and 
rich in material for deep psychological study. 

A peculiarity of the Shakespearean heroes is that 
they are not heroes. They are as a rule beings of 
tremendous power, amiable and admirable in many 
phases of their souls, but cursed with a grave defect 
of character which helps to work their ruin. They 
are called heroes on account of their massive ele- 
ments of good. But they are not heroes in the 
strict sense of the word because they invariably 
fail at the end of the play, partially through their 
own fault. The forces of evil round about them 
dispose them for a moral fall and they themselves 
do not possess the truly heroic self-control to rise 
superior to adverse conditions and conquer. Mac- 
beth, Othello and Lear are examples of the Shake- 
spearean heroes who are not heroes — of men, 
adorned with very lovable traits but deficient in the 
will-power to govern themselves. 

The question naturally arises here: Why does 
Shakespeare invariably create heroes who are not 
heroes? Surely the answer cannot be that life 
affords no examples of heroes of the genuine sort. 
Perhaps his motive is to win our sympathy more 
surely. For, rightly or wrongly, men quite gener- 
ally are inclined to feel a particular compassion for 



MALE CHARACTERS 5 1 

those whose ruin is partially due to their own faults. 
This strange tendency of human sympathy may 
probably be accounted for by the sense of fellow- 
ship which we feel for great men who are not with- 
out faults. We realize that, for all their heroic 
qualities, they are of the same flesh and blood as 
ourselves. 

There is some plausibility in the view that the 
portrayal of a faultless hero, doomed to ruin, would 
create a sense of horror rather than sympathy 
whereas sympathy should be the paramount emo- 
tion at the catastrophe. 

But a more likely explanation is found in the 
requirements of a first-class tragedy. In a second- 
class tragedy the conflict is waged between hero 
and villain. It is external. In a first-class tragedy 
the external conflict is secondary to the more ter- 
rific, engrossing and losing battle waged in the 
hero's own breast between his better and worse 
self. Therefore, to produce a tragedy of the latter 
sort, the dramatist must select a leading character 
whose imperfect will or intellect will yield the vic- 
tory in the long run to the dominant passion that 
assails him. Hamlet yields to a habit of delay, 
Othello to jealousy, Macbeth to ambition, Lear to an 
overweening imperiousness. Hamlet against his 
enemies, Othello against lago, are interesting com- 
batants, but Hamlet's habit of delay pitted against 
his will to do, Othello's jealousy set over against 
his love are far more interesting, and the final inter- 
nal defeat of the good elements at the hand of the 
bad touches the heart more keenly than the outward 
downfall brought about by the villainy. 



52 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

It is clear that the artistic handUng of an imper- 
fect hero is very difficult. For, unless his lovable- 
ness is kept prominent the reader will despise him 
for his weakness. The reader ought not to despise 
him although he may clearly perceive his faults, 
for surely contempt is not an artistic feeling, and a 
dramatist would make a grave artistic blunder were 
he to arouse it and draw it upon his hero. Indeed, 
weakness and failure are set forth by true dramatic 
art to emphasize by force of contrast the level of 
nobility from which a hero pathetically falls. Some 
readers feel contempt for Othello and Hamlet. The 
readers are to blame and not Shakespeare. For in 
passing on to the animal jealousy of the Moor and 
the prone passivity of the melancholy Dane, they 
fail to carry with them, as a counteractant to dis- 
gust, the memory of their nobility. They draw a 
false meaning out of a text for not reading it in 
its context. 

But the most probable explanation of the imper- 
fect hero in Shakespeare is his parallel in fact. Real 
heroes are found, but life is more prolific of good 
and able men, marred by fatal flaws. 

Two of the central truths of human life are physi- 
cal liberty in regard to good and evil; and a pro- 
nounced propensity to evil. Our own conscience is 
a sufficient guarantee for the fact of personal physi- 
cal liberty; and the universal esteem of men for 
mastery in one form or another as being one of the 
most excellent things in the world is a sufficient 
guarantee for the surpassing excellence of master- 
ing one's own future by exercising free will. 
Hence tragedy as a replica of life must set forth 



MALE CHARACTERS 53 

the free will of man. The old Greek tragedians 
have commonly been accused of neglecting it. 
Their heroes are physically forced to fall by en- 
vironment or heredity or some ancestral curse. The 
neglect is not a particular fault of the Greek trage- 
dians. It is the fault of Greek theology which 
included the doctrine of fate. But if there is any 
one feature more prominent than another in the 
tragedies of Shakespeare it is the physical freedom 
of his characters. He was a Christian and wrote 
according to the Christian ideal of personal respon- 
sibility. No one thinks of Hamlet, Othello, Mac- 
beth but as of physically free men. 

Nevertheless they are represented as being under 
the pressure of a strong bias toward evil, because 
no other representation would square with a most 
prominent fact of real life. For what is more com- 
mon in real life than an environment of difficulties 
so many and pressing that, though they can be over- 
come, they will not be overcome except by a strong 
will specially assisted from on high ? 

Now, a recurrent feature of Shakespeare's trage- 
dies is the hero, admirable in many ways, but de- 
fective in some pronounced feature of his character, 
placed in a particular set of circumstances which will 
(though they need not) prove fatal to him. He can 
master them, but he will not, the difficulties are so 
great. And, indeed, a keen reader of the drama, 
after a survey of the hero and his environment, can 
prognosticate his course of action pretty accurately. 
At any rate after reading the play, on looking back 
over its course of action, he cannot but see how nat- 
urally the catastrophe grew out of its antecedents. 



54 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

Othello can reject the representations of lago and 
of his own imagination against Desdemona ; but the 
snares have been so dexterously laid that, for a fact, 
he will not evade them. Hamlet can rouse his pros- 
trate will to action; but we know that, under the 
stress of outward circumstances and inward melan- 
choly, he zvill not. Macbeth can follow conscience ; 
but he will follow ambition. 



III. TRAGIC CAUSALITY IN SHAKE- 
SPEARE 

The importance of character in Shakespearean 
tragedy will be made still more apparent by consid- 
ering tragic causality, so strikingly exemplified in all 
the poet's great tragedies. 

Causality is the link between cause and effect, and 
tragic causality means the intimate connection be- 
tween the characters and the whole action of the 
play. The characters are the cause, and the plot 
grows out of them. Hence the whole color, atmos- 
phere, tone of the play are as the characters are. An 
illustration of the importance of tragic causality may 
be drawn by again contrasting tragedy with lyric 
and epic poetry. In a lyric, as I hinted above, the 
poet gives vent to the joys, grief, hopes, fears, aspi- 
rations and loves of his heart. A lyric is not the ex- 
hibition of human wills, aiming more or less delib- 
erately at a definite end. The purpose of a lyric is 
nothing more than the expression of the poet's own 
emotions. An epic poem, 'tis true, sets before us 
men acting with a purpose. But the sequence be- 
tween aims and results is not so vital to an epic 
poem as to a tragedy. Chance plays a most impor- 
tant part in an epic. Big things in the poem happen 
independently of the wills of the characters. The 
human agents are not the sole nor principal makers 
of the action ; they are often passively driven on by 
a divinity which shapes their ends. Their own initi- 
ative is secondary to the ruling powers of the em- 
pyrean. Chance, luck, destiny has some place in 
tragedy also; but it is subsidiary. Human choice 
55 



56 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

must be paramount. In the ''Odyssey/' for instance, 
most of the events simply happen. They are created 
for the hero by chance ; he himself does not create 
them. In fact, it would not be extravagant to sup- 
pose an epic poet first drawing up in his mind an 
elaborate scheme of events, worked out in detail be- 
fore he even thinks of his characters : and then, only 
on second thought, creating his characters and set- 
ting them to experience the events. Whereas a tra- 
gic poet first imagines his characters, contemplates 
them, sees them acting according to the natural lean- 
ing of their souls, and then writes his play. Thus 
in an epic characters may be created to fit in with 
the action which is predetermined in the poet's mind. 
In a tragedy the action must square with the char- 
acters. The growth of an epic theme may be com- 
pared to the inanimate growth of a crystal. It is ex- 
ternal, depending upon the poet's arbitrary accu- 
mulation of interesting happenings. The growth of 
a tragedy is like the vital growth of a seed. It is 
from within, rooted in and springing from the heart 
and mind of the tragic characters. Epic incidents, 
coloring, drift and outcome may be just as the poet 
wishes them to be. But tragic incidents, coloring, 
drift and outcome must be just as the characters 
require. 

Hence the engrossing interest which tragedy has 
always afforded to men as rational beings. As ra- 
tional beings we like to trace the links between cause 
and effect. Tragedy affords us the opportunity. 
Other forms of poetry make their appeal to the im- 
agination and heart. Tragedy does this too ; but it 
is also, perhaps preeminently, an appeal to reason. 



TRAGIC CAUSALITY IN SHAKESPEARE 57 

Now, tragic causality runs through every tragedy 
of Shakespeare. Were not lago, Othello and Desde- 
mona the peculiar characters they are, the play of 
"Othello" would not be what it is. For instance, 
were Cordelia in Desdemona's place she would have 
insisted with Othello, in her high way, on an ex- 
planation of his conduct, and therefore lago's plot 
would have collapsed. But because Desdemona's 
character was one of silent long- suffering the plot 
progressed. Again, if Hamlet had been in Othello's 
place there would not have been a tragedy. For 
Hamlet's keen intellectuality would have made him 
a match for the astute lago. Hamlet was accus- 
tomed to a most elaborate self-examination of mo- 
tives, leanings, schemings of the human heart. He 
knew by personal internal experience all the fits and 
starts, the cool calculations, the adaptations of 
means to ends, the wary preparations, the tortuous 
advances, the feignings, the quick changes of front 
and all the other manifold and intricate workings of 
an abnormally active mind. He would have applied 
his self-knowledge and converted it into a knowl- 
edge of lago. His own capability for intellectual 
elaboration in a good cause would have served him 
well in guessing at lago's intellectual elaboration in 
a bad cause. But Othello was too grandly simple to 
suspect. On the other hand, however, precisely be- 
cause Othello was sudden and quick in action there 
would have been no tragedy of Hamlet had he been 
in place of the melancholy Dane. For he would 
have gone straight from the platform and his audi- 
ence with the ghost and slain his uncle without 
thought. 



IV. SHAKESPEARE AND THE IMPROB- 
ABLE 

The charge of improbabihty has frequently been 
urged against characters of Shakespeare. The 
charge includes male and female, characters of 
comedy and tragedy, but more emphasis is placed 
on it in regard to tragic heroes. It is said, for 
instance, that Hamlet's delays, Othello's hardening 
towards Desdemona, Lear's division of his king- 
dom, Macbeth's terrors of conscience are improb- 
able. In like manner, flaws are picked in his plots. 
The casket scene and the pound of flesh are ac- 
counted unreal. 

In answering the objection, I would state, first, 
that some of the factors of the poet's tragedies are 
improbable in themselves and in the manner of 
presenting them; second, other elements are im- 
probable in themselves, but not in their manner of 
presentation, and third, other elements to which 
exception is taken are not improbable in any way. 
Their seeming to be so is due to one or other defect 
in the perception of the reader. 

The division of the kingdom in Lear, I am 
aware, has been defended and explained by some 
critics. Nevertheless, it appears to exemplify the 
improbability noted in the first place above. 
Shakespeare perhaps did not care whether that in- 
cident was probable or not. He wished to pour out 
the riches of his genius in elaborating the later 
great scenes, which would have been impossible 
without that first improbability. He admitted the 

58 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE IMPROBABLE 59 

improbability for the sake of the pathetic things 
that flowed from it, and did not bother about the 
artistic valuelessness of the means, so long as they 
served his end. 

But not all the improbabilities in the plays of 
Shakespeare are open to criticism. Those that are 
made to appear probable by the art of the dramatist 
are to be commended. For an important criterion 
of good dramatic art is not necessarily the objective 
plausibility of characters and incidents, but rather 
their seeming plausibility. If a dramatist can make 
the unlikely appear likely, he has fulfilled the re- 
quirements. Now nothing is more characteristic 
of Shakespeare than the clothing of the unusual in 
ordinary semblances, and nothing is less deserving 
of unfavorable comment. He gives to the airy 
nothingness of the improbable the local habitation 
aijd the name of the probable. Take many of the 
factors of a plot of hi^ from the context and they 
seem crudely extravagant; study them in their set- 
ting and you forget to criticise. The atmosphere he 
throws around them, the background against which 
he places them, the gradual approaches which he 
makes to them from a starting point of ordinary 
events have the efifect of illusionment. You are 
allured from a rationalizing attitude, you forget to 
advert to the tenuousness of the web of incidents 
being woven around you, you accept everything 
with implicit faith and only after the spell has been 
broken at the end of the play do you think of say- 
ing: How very improbable! Men that criticise the 
casket scene and the pound of flesh in "The Mer- 
chant of Venice," the statue scene in "The Winter's 



6o AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

Tale/' the leap from the cliff in ''Lear," and certain 
manifestations of character too numerous to men- 
tion, occurring here and there throughout the 
plays, level their attacks only after they have closed 
the book and gotten beyond the reach of the poet's 
magic wand. This is unfair. Poetry must be stud- 
ied poetically. It is a thing of concrete beauty 
which capnot be appreciated without imagination 
and heart. Subject it to the touch of cold analysis 
and you divest it of its charm, as you destroy the 
beauty of a flower by the very act of taking it 
apart. The less imagination and feeling in a stu- 
dent of philosophy, the better for him in his own 
sphere of study ; the worse for him if he transfer his 
energies to the study of poetry. For though in the 
study of poetry the mind is used, yet it is not domi- 
nant. The feelings and imagination are the princi- 
pals ; the mind only runs along supplying them with 
materials. The mind is made for truth, the imagi- 
nation and heart are made for beauty. Therefore, 
the mind is at greater advantage in the field of phi- 
losophy, which embodies truth. The imagination 
and heart are at home in the field of poetry, which 
embodies the beautiful. Now, after a play, a man's 
feelings and fancy subside; his mind resumes its 
plain and unimpassioned activity. In the course 
of a play, these respective faculties act inversely. 
Hence the propriety of judging of Shakespeare's 
improbabilities by the effect they produce on an 
engrossed reader or spectator and not by the im- 
pression made by them upon a cold, calculating 
critic. 

Finally, other factors of Shakespearean tragedy 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE IMPROBABLE 6l 

to which exception has been taken on the score of 
improbability are not improbable either in them- 
selves or in Shakespeare's manner of presenting 
them. The difficulty lies with the reader. When 
we hear a reader say that Othello is impossible (I 
take only one of twenty like animadversions against 
the probability, of Shakespeare's characters), we 
may put him down as being under one or another 
of several disadvantages. He has not had personal 
experience of the tremendous possibilities of human 
passion set aflame; or he is mistaking unreason- 
ableness of conduct for unnaturalness of conduct; 
or he is not aware that Shakespeare's purpose is to 
represent abnormal men in an extraordinarily try- 
ing environment; or he has forgotten that exag- 
gerated dramatic portrayal is not a fault, provided 
it does not pass the* boundary of human nature to 
the plane of devils or angels ; or he has followed the 
play only half-heartedly. In fact, he may be labor- 
ing under several of these disadvantages. How, 
therefore, can his indictment have any weight? 

Perhaps the most common cause of misappre- 
hending the value of Shakespeare's characters is the 
last-named condition of mind. 

The thorough appreciation of tragedy presup- 
poses a thorough reading of it. Literature in gen- 
eral and tragedy in particular are too generally 
looked upon as mere luxuries. They are supposed 
to tide the mind over a weary hour or minister to 
a cultivated taste. They are luxuries in a sense, 
but in no sense are they superficial. They require 
as much application in a student as the most ab- 
struse philosophy. The application, however, is of 



62 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

a different sort. For, while the philosopher must 
apply his mind, the reader of tragedy must apply 
his imagination and heart. There is not much 
need of imagination or heart in unravelling philo- 
sophic problems. There is not much need of intel- 
lect in simply understanding a play. But the 
understanding of a play is not the appreciation of 
it. For this, the imagination and heart must glow ; 
and they will not glow without tense and continued 
application. A reader must steep himself in the 
lines before him and- read much between the lines, 
imagining twenty things that are suggested but not 
expressed. He must picture, scenes and nojt merely 
read stage directions between brackets, and he 
must fill in the pictures and- not be satisfied with 
an outline. He must trace words on the lips to 
their source in the heart, and behind action look 
for motives. In the catastrophe he himself n>ust be 
the sufferer. If he remain a spectator, his grief 
will be superficial ; only a pleasant bit of the luxury 
of emotion. But with the anguish of hero and hero- 
ine become his own by his dramatic identification 
of himself with them, he will refrain from criticising 
apparent improbabilities of character and will ex- 
perience a real rending of the heart. 

I may suggest finally that possibly a lack of 
natural sensibility explains the callousness of some 
readers to the appeal of Shakespeare's heroes. 
There are men that simply have not a heart for 
natural scenery. They have an eye for it. They 
can see its colors and shapes. But they cannot feel 
the throbbing of its heart against their own. Hence 
their persuasion that true lovers of nature are ex- 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE IMPROBABLE 63 

iravagant in their admiring expressions. Again, 
there are men that have no special aptitude for 
philosophy. To them philosophy is a Babel of 
words, a museum of fossilized mental formalities. 
Hence they think that an enthusiastic student of 
philosophy is a conceited pretender. And in like 
manner there are men that cannot keenly feel 
tragedy; to their mind, an intensely sympathetic 
reader of it is an anomaly. Though men, they 
are hardly human in their sympathies; they are 
cold and unimpassioned. No amount of experi- 
ence in life is capable of bringing their passions 
into play, because they lack them, and therefore the 
exhibition of passion at white heat in Shakespeare's 
tragedies, driving men on to unwonted manifesta- 
tions of character, seems to them a pure extrava- 
gance of portrayal. 



V. DRAMATIC ACTION 

Much need not be said about action in tragedy: 
for the necessity of action is evident. Shakespeare's 
superiority to at least one class of modern play- 
writers lies in his combination of character-study 
with dramatic action. An analysis of human mo- 
tives, peculiarities, weakness and strength in a con- 
crete character may be a fine psychological study; 
but it need not therefore be a good play. A tragedy 
is more than a leisurely contemplation of isolated 
men and women, living apart from the activities of 
life in the privacy of their own souls. What we 
see of the souls of dramatic characters must be seen 
as it were in passing, by intermittent glances at 
them in the midst of the onward sweep of their out- 
ward energies. The action and plot are only the 
body of the play. The character-drawing is the soul. 
This must be granted. But, though the body is less 
than the soul, it is essential. 

A lyric is only an expression of passion in words, 
without action ; an epic is a series of grand events, 
touched with passion of course, but chiefly effective 
through their external interest. A tragedy combines 
in itself the inwardness of the lyric with the out- 
wardness of the epic. It may be described as the 
passions of the heart working themselves out into 
action ; or in other words action permeated by pas- 
sion. Some of Shakespeare's historical plays do not 
deserve the name of tragedy because they are hardly 
more than a stringing together of historical events. 
But in his great tragedies beneath the surface of 

64 



DRAMATIC ACTION 65 

events lies precious and abundant matter for con- 
crete psychological study. 

CONFLICT 

The action of tragedy is carried on between con- 
flicting powers. A reference has already been made 
to the two sorts of conflict proper to tragedy. The 
protagonists in the external conflict are the hero and 
villain: the internal protagonists are the mutually 
inimical forces of good and evil in the hero's own 
soul. In this connection it may be remarked that the 
Greek tragedy of Antigone is not ideal. For the 
tragic conflict is external — between Antigone and 
her enemy. It is true a warfare of intense interest 
is also waged in her own bosom between her love of 
life and her purpose to endure death for love's sake. 
But observe, this conflict is not properly tragic ; for 
it results in a victory and a triumph for the nobler 
part of her. We grieve at her death, but we exult 
that she has kept her firm soul intact. 

Conflict exercises two influences on tragedy. It 
makes tragedy more interesting and more pathetic. 
More interesting : for an encounter naturally appeals 
to men. For instance, however much we deprecate 
the present war for the sorrows it has bred, we are 
tensely interested in the outcome of formidable 
forces crossing swords. More pathetic : for surely 
the sight of a hero, prostrate after a brilliant effort 
to succeed, appeals to our compassion more potently 
than if the hero were merely a passive sufferer. 
Othello's repeated efforts to throw off jealousy lend 
a peculiar painfulness to his final yielding: and 
Hamlet's procrastinations would be utterly con- 



66 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

temptible were they not preceded by brave but in- 
sufficient efforts to be strong. Macbeth too is saved 
from being a mere villain and awakens a feeling 
of pity in his prostrate moral ruin by the frantic 
efforts which his conscience had made to stop him in 
his ambitious march to the throne. 

CLIMAX 
The climax of a tragedy is the highest point of 
the hero's successful activity. The energy of the 
villain mounts higher after the climax, but the hero's 
star begins to decline. The hero may energize more 
after the climax than before, but his efforts are 
being made then in a losing cause. But, though the 
hero falls off in successful action after the climax 
interest in him does not (or, at any rate, ought not 
to) decrease. A play would be a poor affair in- 
deed if its post-climactic portions were less inter- 
esting than its prior parts. A declension in action 
need not involve a similar declension in interest : 
although interest is very likely to wane with the 
waning of action. For we are not prone to be in- 
terested in a character that is not conspicuous for 
action. The sufferings of a hero elicit sympathy, 
but sympathy is not interest. Hence one of the 
main efforts of a dramatist must be to sustain, if 
not to increase, interest in the hero after the climax ; 
and it may be questioned if even Shakespeare has 
completely succeeded in all his best tragedies in this 
difficult undertaking. More than one person of 
judgment has preferred the ante-climactic parts of 
both "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" to the portions which 
follow the climax. 



DRAMATIC ACTION 67 

An engaging bit of study consists in observing the 
dramatic resourcefulness brought into play in the 
latter acts of tragedies to prevent loss of interest. 
In the play of **Hamlet," Laertes' encounter with 
the King and the ravings of Ophelia supply for the 
protracted absence of Hamlet from the scene of 
action : and Hamlet's encounter with the grave-dig- 
gers, which is only a digression, helps to tide us over 
to the catastrophe. In ''J^^i^s Csesar," the quarrel 
scene between Brutus and Cassius is introduced not 
less for the extrinsic purpose of stimulating interest 
after the star of Brutus has begun to wane than for 
any other end more essential to the play. 

The increased importance of the villain in the lat- 
ter acts of the play adds to the difficulty of making 
those acts an artistic success. For his importance 
can easily be overemphasized or insufficiently in- 
creased. If the first possibility be actualized, he will 
overshadow the hero ; if the second, he will not be 
a protagonist of big enough proportions to measure 
up to the hero in an equal fight. In either case the 
play will suffer. 

In the play of "Hamlet," Laertes who during the 
first acts appears to be scarcely more than a friv- 
olous youth, later on through his grief for Ophelia's 
madness and death, his bearding of the King and 
his oath of vengeance, looms as a large figure 
worthy of crossing swords with the Dane. Mark 
Antony by his speech to the Romans sud- 
denly shoots up to the size of Brutus ; and Macduff 
is made greater than himself by the news of his 
slaughtered wife and children. And yet the heroes 
are not overshadowed by these new-grown giants. 



68 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

As the climax is the culmination of the action, 
which begins in the first act, it is natural to turn now 
to the first act and to make a few observations on 
the opening of the play. The first act of the play is 
hard to handle. Characters must be introduced to 
the audience, the idea of the play must be at least 
partially revealed ; its tone, atmosphere, coloring, 
must be shown. How can this be done briefly, ar- 
tistically, effectively? The use of a prologue is 
clumsy. Soliloquies, which are nothing more than 
confidential explanations to the audience, are crude. 
Prolonged explanatory conversations between char- 
acters for the enlightenment of the auditors are tir- 
ing. But a few exchanges of ideas, appearing to be 
more or less accidental and informal, are all that is 
permitted in the initial scenes. The weaving of such 
brief but pregnant introductions is a trial of con- 
summate skill. 

Shakespeare is a master in the construction of 
opening scenes. The ghost-scene in *'Hamlet," the 
scene of the witches in ''Macbeth," the mob scene in 
"Julius Caesar" and the street scene in ''Romeo and 
Juliet" hurry us away immediately as if by magic, 
from real life into a tragic world. They give the 
prevailing tone of those tragedies and raise the cur- 
tain sufficiently to acquaint us with the character of 
the story. 

The ordinary place for the climax is the end of 
the third act. We have, however, two remarkable 
exceptions to the rule in "Macbeth" and "Othello." 
For the successful action of Macbeth and Lady 
Macbeth mounts to its highest at the beginning of 
the second act: and in "Othello" the hero is still a 



DRAMATIC ACTION 69 

successful man (in his own opinion) in unmasking 
the wickedness of Desdemona well-nigh to the end 
of the play. 

A play with an early climax has the advantage of 
hurrying on the audience without delay to the top 
of the action. It involves, however, the drawback 
of being obliged to sustain interest for an abnor- 
mally long period between climax and catastrophe. 
Inversely, a play with a late climax is likely to drag 
through the first acts. But there is no danger of a 
slowing down in interest during the short time be- 
tween climax and catastrophe. 

The difficulty of successfully managing irregu- 
larly placed climaxes seems to have outweighed 
their advantages in the judgment of Shakespeare. 
For the end of the third act is the favorite place 
with him. Another motive, however, may have 
made him averse to late climaxes — i.e., the need of 
room to teach the lesson of punishment in wait for 
the hero's faults and the villain's crimes. As we 
shall see later, tragedy instills the terrific truth that 
'*the v/ages of sin is death." Before the climax the 
lesson cannot be taught ; for the hero is in the ascen- 
dant and the villain has not reached the collapse of 
his maneuvering. Hence the necessity of consider- 
able space after the climax to elaborate the idea of 
the sanction of the natural law. 

The importance of climax in tragedy can be illus- 
trated by referring to another difference between 
tragedy and lyric and epic poetry. A lyric is a full 
and glorious outburst of emotion and imagery; it 
may be a tumultuous improvisation, a poetic f erver- 
ino, beginning ex abrupt© and ending in the same 



70 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

style, without graduation of intensity. An epic 
poem may run along on the same level of interest 
and action from beginning to end without mounting 
to peaks or descending to caverns of emotion. In- 
deed, an epic may be more interesting and replete 
with action at the start than in the middle or at the 
end without gravely falling short of the epic ideal. 
In the judgment of most readers, for instance, the 
fall of the rebel Angels in the first portion of "Para- 
dise Lost" is unequaled by anything that follows; 
and many, without intending to criticise the "Divina 
Commedia," have expressed more favorable views 
of Dante's "Inferno" than of his "Purgatorio" and 
"Paradiso." But the action of a tragedy begins low, 
mounts to its highest point at the climax and then 
sinks through failure, sorrow and death to the 
catastrophe. It may be compared to the waters of a 
lake, mounting from the trough of a wave to the 
crest and then sinking from the crest to the trough. 

CATASTROPHE 

In the catastrophe lie the heart and soul of trag- 
edy. Every portion of the play is supposed to 
point to it. The antecedent success, happiness and 
greatness of hero and heroine are intended only to 
make the catastrophe more impressive by contrast. 
In the catastrophe the greatest power of the dra- 
matist is called into requisition. If he fail here, he 
fails seriously, while on the other hand a masterly 
catastrophe redeems faults of composition that may 
precede it. 

In the catastrophe two big elements are empha- 
sized: the pathetic and the terrible. The pathetic 



DRAMATIC ACTION yi 

arouses sympathy and the terrible causes fear. In 
all tragedies both factors are found, but in some 
the one predominates and in others the other. Mac- 
beth, for instance, is an exemplification of the ter- 
rible with little of the pathetic. The most pathetic 
of Shakespeare's tragedies is Othello. The terrible 
is embodied in the downfall of hero or heroine and 
in the punishment of the villain; the pathetic con- 
sists in the vision of noble characters destroyed. 
Nobody who follows a terrible tragedy heartily can 
but fear for himself lest in his human weakness he 
may possibly fall into wickedness and experience its 
punishment. Nobody who enters heart and soul 
into a pathetic tragedy can remain callous to the 
appealing beauty of suffering in amiable men and 
women. The sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth, I 
would venture to say, has made many a person 
think twice before entering the path of wickedness, 
which leads to the fearful goal of remorse. And 
the sight of innocence and sweetness crushed in 
Desdemona has stirred the souls of thousands to 
their depths with self-forgetting compassion. 



VI. IRONY, ATMOSPHERE, OMENS 

Three very subtle forces in the tragedies of 
Shakespeare are Irony, Atmosphere and Omens. 
They are subtle, because their influence though 
emphatically felt is hard to describe. 

Ordinary irony is the conveying of one idea 
under the expression of another, the speaker and 
perhaps the hearer both perceiving the disguise. 
Extraordinary irony is a disguise not perceived by 
either speaker or hearer, but (in the case of a play) 
perceived by the dramatist and his reader. It is 
easier to feel than to describe its peculiar tragic 
effectiveness. Extraordinary irony is used here and 
there by Shakespeare in many of his tragedies, but 
as Bradley observes, ''Macbeth" is noted for its fre- 
quent occurrence. When, for instance, Banquo utters 
the lines, "This castle hath a pleasant seat," etc., de- 
scriptive of the peaceful beauty of Macbeth's hold, 
Banquo was not ironical, but Shakespeare was. 
And in the light of the subsequent villainies which 
made that fair place a hell, the sinister veiled sug- 
gestiveness of the lines appears. When, after being 
assured of the execution done on Cawdor for his 
treason, the King expresses perfect confidence in 
Macbeth, who at that very moment was meditating 
the perfidious murder of his sovereign, the cruel 
irony of the situation strikes us like a blow. When 
Lady Macbeth lightly exclaims, "A little water 
clears us of this deed, how easy then," we think 
of those later words of hers: "Can all the perfumes 
of Arabia sweeten this little hand?" The lady in 
making light of the guilt and punishment of mur- 
72 



IRONY, ATMOSPHERE, OMENS 73 

der maybe was sincere, but Shakespeare in putting 
those flippant words into her mouth was terribly 
ironical. The drunken servitor on that awful night 
dreams that he was keeping the gate of hell, and 
we think with Shakespeare, though the servitor 
did not when he spoke, how true a dream! Mac- 
beth, with hypocritical graciousness, says to Banquo 
at parting: "Fail not our feast to-night." Banquo, 
already doomed by Macbeth to murder on the 
road, answers: "I shall be there," and he kept his 
word, for his ghost came to put the King from his 
seat. Neither Macbeth nor Banquo saw the irony 
of the promise, but the reader does, and Shake- 
speare intended that he should. 

Possibly some passages may be ironical only in 
the reader's imagination. Or, supposing Shake- 
speare intended them to be ironical, we need not 
suppose that his intention was deliberate and ex- 
plicit. Perhaps he himself was hardly aware of the 
double meaning he conveyed. The sarcastic sug- 
gestiveness may have been a bit of unconscious 
cerebration on his part. But, for all that, it is none 
the less powerful, as many another blind, instinctive 
utterance is not less powerful than the most delib- 
erate attempt at expression. 

ATMOSPHERE 
Atmosphere in tragedy is as intangible as the 
atmosphere of the physical world. I believe I re- 
ferred to its elusiveness when I spoke of the sug- 
gestiveness of Shakespeare. It surrounds and per- 
meates the plays and gives them an individual tone 
and color, although it is made up of infinitesmal 



74 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

circumstantial elements. You feel its influence 
unconsciously (if I may be allowed the expression), 
but if asked to describe it you would find yourself 
embarrassed by a dearth of descriptive words. Its 
effect upon your soul appears to better advantage 
when it is being enjoyed than when it is subjected 
to analysis. But in a negative way we may at least 
oflfer the patent fact that atmosphere is not plot, 
characters nor scenery. It surrounds them; it 
emanates from them, but it is not the same thing. 
I should imagine that a dramatist spends more time 
in creating atmosphere than in elaborating the 
more definite factors of his play, and that his style 
of work in that occult performance is quite dis- 
tinctive. He ponders, he contemplates, he dreams 
about the outstanding definite factors of his story, 
he circles around thern, he waits in patience for the 
new thing to come, and in the end, almost without 
his knowing, the atmosphere is there, breathed out 
of plot, character, action, scenery, like a circum- 
ambient fragrance from a bed of flowers. 

Now Shakespeare's greater plays are famous for 
atmosphere. It is a thing which may escape the 
undiscerning, but even a casual reader, not barren 
of poetic appreciation, perceives it when he closes 
the book. "As You Like It" would be a flimsy 
piece of composition without it. It is unmistakable 
in "The Tempest," 'The Midsummer Night's 
Dream," "Romeo and Juliet." But the great trage- 
dies are the best exemplifications of atmosphere ; for 
they are encompassed by it, and to understand their 
greatness you must view them through that 
medium. 



IRONY, ATMOSPHERE, OMENS 75 

The play of "Macbeth," in particular, is not less 
notable for atmosphere than for irony. Bradley 
puts the idea graphically in saying that we behold 
the whole action of the play through a sanguinary 
mist. To attempt to analyze the mist would, as I 
hinted above, be preposterous. Nevertheless the 
material elements out of which the poet formed the 
mysterious thing are patent, and as a bare enumera- 
tion of them may serve as a distant approach to the 
comprehension of it, it may not be inadvisable to 
indicate here, by way of exemplifying Shakespeare's 
general method, some of the circumstantial horrors 
employed, although by rights they belong rather 
to a special study of the play of "Macbeth." Dark- 
ness prevails through the play. It was a foul day 
on the heath when the witches appeared. Their 
dwelling was a murky cavern. The murder of 
Duncan was done at night. References to dark- 
ness in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's speeches 
are numerous. The darkness appalled Banquo 
when he crossed the courtyard: "There is hus- 
bandry in heaven! Their" candles are all out." 
When he came along the road to meet his murder- 
ers, the terrors of the night overwhelmed him. And 
Lady Macbeth's sleep-walking received a new ac- 
cess of horror from the circumstance of the red 
flicker of her candle-light, making the black night 
visible. 

Against the darkness of the play are splashes of 
red: red torches and red blood. The frequent ref- 
erence to torches and the prevalence of the idea of 
blood are not accidental. They are so recurrent that 
they were evidently intended to give a definite tone. 



76 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

A keen intuition is not required to discover this. 
Then the multiplication of blood-curdling figures of 
speech, such as a mother dashing her babe upon the 
stone, and the whole frame of the world disjointed, 
and pity like a new-born babe striding the blast! 
Moreover, miraculous happenings are perceived in 
the air and sea and on the earth. Duncan's horses 
try to devour each other ; hurricanes topple steeples ; 
night birds fill the darkness with plaints; the pres- 
ence of the witches poisons the atmosphere. Worst 
of all, the evidence of preternatural agencies at 
work in the souls of Macbeth and his lady is most 
uncanny. The thought of murder is like a living 
demon in his breast. He sees the pendant dagger 
in the air; he hears the voice cry: "Sleep no more." 
The blood on his hands plucks out his eyes. The 
knocking at the door makes him quake. He sees 
the ghost of Banquo, and in the end Lady Macbeth 
is nightly impelled, against her own strong will, to 
rise from her bed and live through the agony of 
the murder scene again and again. Both of them 
sup on horrors. Within and without they are en- 
compassed by dread presences. These things we 
cannot forget. The more material elements of the 
play may pass from our memory with time, but the 
spiritual atmosphere of Macbeth — the atmosphere 
of darkness, red horror and preternatural presences 
— remains forever with a reader who has read the 
play with imagination aroused. 

OMENS 

How weird are the omens scattered through the 
tragedies! They are not many nor important, ac- 



IRONY, ATMOSPHERE, OMENS 'Jj 

cording to the measure of lines ; but they hah the 
reader with sudden impressiveness and leave in his 
soul a combined feeling of sympathy and mystery. 
In some cases they are a bolt from the blue. At the 
height of a hero's career, in the flush of his hope- 
fulness, the veil of the future is momentarily drawn 
for him, and his joy is shivered with ill-boding. In 
other cases, when his fortunes are already drooping, 
and he knows it, a portend makes his assurance of 
failure doubly sure to him; puts another lock upon 
his fastening-down and disabuses the reader of the 
last rays of hope he may have been cherishing for a 
favorable outcome of the tragedy. Romeo, in the 
thrill and glow of his first meeting with Juliet, stops 
suddenly and exclaims : 

"I fear too early, for my mind misgives 
Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars 
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date 
With this night's revels;" 

then gallantly concludes : 

"But he that, hath the steerage of my course 
Direct my sail ! On, lusty gentlemen !" 

Hamlet, busy with preparation for his friendly ra- 
pier-tilt with Laertes, suddenly sees the shadow of 
doom : *'But thou wouldst not think how ill all's here 
about my heart !" But he laughs it ofif. 

And Desdemona sees death before its approach: 
"My eyes do itch. Doth that bode weeping? How 
foolish are our thoughts? If I should die before 
thee, prythee, shroud me in one of those same 
sheets." 



VIL UNITIES, BORROWED PLOTS, 
SUICIDE 

The advantages and disadvantages of observing 
or not observing the three unities of time, place and 
action have been so often discussed that it seems ad- 
visable to say only a word about them here. Shake- 
speare generally observes the unity of action. His 
observance however differs from that of the Greeks ; 
for, while austere simplicity characterizes the 
working out of their plots, luxuriant variety at- 
tends Shakespeare's prosecution of a central idea. 
The old contrast between Greek and Gothic archi- 
tecture illustrates the difference between the Greeks 
and Shakespeare. The bearing of certain elements 
of his tragedies upon the main issue seems irrele- 
\rant ; but a closer study of them reveals their perti- 
nency. The secondary plot in "Lear" e.g., has more 
than once been subjected to scathing criticism, as 
being only a repetition in miniature of the primary 
theme. It detracts therefore, some critics say, from 
the impressiveness of the story of Lear, Cordelia 
and Kent; as the rendition of a superb piece of 
music on a hand-organ detracts from the impres- 
siveness of its rendition on a grand organ. But this 
criticism seems to be launched unwisely. For the 
very sameness of the secondary plot, worked out, 
however on a minor scale emphasizes by contrast 
the tremendous proportions of the primary, as a 
little hill makes a high hill at its side look higher by 
contrast. The lesser misfortunes of Gloster empha- 
size the greater misfortunes of Lear; the lesser 

78 



UNITIES, BORROWED PLOTS, SUICIDE 79 

wickedness of Edmund emphasizes the greater wick- 
edness of Regan and Goneril; the lesser beauty of 
Kent's character emphasizes the greater beauty of 
CordeHa's. 

Perhaps some other departures from strict unity 
of effect are not only seeming, but real. If so, they 
either can be defended on the plea that life in 
the concrete, which Shakespeare studiously strove 
to represent, is not after all a whole of perfect 
symmetry and mathematic consistency, but a con- 
glomerate mass of thoughts, ambitions and activi- 
ties, full of divergent tendencies and tumultuous dis- 
crepancies ; or they can at least be palliated by the 
exuberant fecundity of his imagination, which he 
sometimes indulged out of sheer love of exercise 
without adverting to the oblique bearing of its 
activities. 

Whatever be the drawbacks of Shakespeare's 
neglect of the unities of time and place, at any rate 
variety and abundance of incident and character are 
well served by that neglect. But another effect is 
produced by the liberty which he takes with time; 
i.e., the mellowed beauty with which intervening 
years like an intervening atmosphere clothes the 
past. Many a present great deed loses in its appeal 
by its very nearness. The battles of antiquity are 
glorified by the glamor of centuries ; the present 
European struggle is doing well to share in our in- 
terest with the score or picture show. Future gen- 
erations will get the right perspective, and perhaps 
another Homer will sing another and greater 
"Iliad." Shakespeare understood that distance in 
time as well as space lends enchantment to the view 



8o AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

and availed himself of the transformation. The 
''Winter's Tale" illustrates. To me, personally, the 
sufferings of Hermione have always seemed more 
pathetic through the mist of seventeen years than 
when they transpired. The jealous excesses of the 
King, his unbounded cruelty and the complete en- 
durance of the queen overwhelm my power of sym- 
pathy when they occur. But when I look back from 
the art-chamber of Paulina and think with Perdita 
of her mother's past martyrdom, I feel its meaning 
better. Moreover, the years of patient waiting in 
retirement and the permanence of Hermione's spirit 
of forgiveness could not have been represented with- 
out neglecting the unity of time. 

BORROWED PLOTS 
Shakespeare, we know, borrowed his plots. Why ? 
It would be interesting for us to have a plot of his 
own making. Perhaps it would not bear comparison 
with many plots of the moderns. Perhaps it would 
surpass them. Evidently, whatever his powers were 
along that line, his taste did not incline him to try his 
hand at the art. Other and greater things engrossed 
him. He was satisfied to take middling stories and 
immortalize them by the surpassing spirit of his 
genius. And therefore they are read and re-read. 
The plot of a great story is engrossing but ephem- 
eral. The underlying spirit invites repeated con- 
templation. We enjoy the "Hound of the Basker- 
villes," but read it only once; but generations have 
worn the pages of "Hamlet" and found them peren- 
nial in beauty and truth. 



UNITIES, BORROWED PLOTS, SUICIDE 8l 

SUICIDE 

Every reader of the great dramatist must have 
observed the air of nobility about his suicides. Bru- 
tus, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Cleopatra are glori- 
fied by their ending. Their utterances at the last 
moment are high preludes to an incomparable deed, 
and the reader's sympathies are caught. Othello 
was never more superb than when he said : "and tell 
them that in Aleppo once, where a malignant and a 
turbaned Turk struck a Venetian and traduced the 
state, I took by the throat the circumcised dog and 
smote him thus." 

Now, suicide is an ignoble thing. How then ex- 
plain the transformation which Shakespeare makes 
in its character? Briefly, very often a mean deed is 
done through a noble motive. The motive does not 
justify the deed ; nevertheless it may be so engaging 
that its beauty quite veils the ugliness of the deed. 
Romeo and Juliet commit suicide through boundless 
love; they would rather be dead together than live 
apart ; and we, caught by the vision of their love, be- 
come oblivious for the time being of the immorality 
of their deed. Brutus loves the commonwealth so 
passionately that he would rather die than see it 
enthralled in the golden manacles of an emperor. 
Othello's heart was so engrossed with the lovableness 
of Desdemona that, with her gone, all the world was 
dirt. ''Where should Othello go?" How poignant 
these words are ! We forget the ignobleness of their 
deed in our admiration of their love. 

The morality of Shakespeare in his treatment of 
suicide, it appears to me, is open to question. It 
would seem that in this matter he is blameworthy. 



82 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

The tragic effectiveness of high-minded suicides was 
very alluring to him, but the evil of the thing ought 
not to have been glorified. No doubt the glamor 
thrown around self-destruction by his talismanic 
power has been in part accountable for the too gen- 
eral recognition of suicide among men as a prefer- 
able alternative to continuance in a crushed career. 
Better things are often less brilliant things. The 
tragedies of Shakespeare would have been better 
embodiments of morality without suicide, though 
they would have lost in dramatic power. 



VIII. INARTICULATE ELOQUENCE 

We spoke above of Shakespeare's miraculous 
power of expression. We were referring to his 
abiHty to express himself in words. Truly, his 
command of speech is marvellous! But he has a 
greater power — that of showing the deepest pas- 
sions of the heart without using articulate expres- 
sions. The mind of man manifests its judgments 
by propositions, i.e., it encloses its thoughts in 
regular sentences of subject and predicate. But 
the heart is a different faculty, and when its pas- 
sions are roused, it pours itself out in flaming jets 
of fragmentary language; for, as the passions are 
blind, spontaneous and tumultuous, naturally the 
words which convey them lack poise and calm 
regularity of construction. I am referring to the 
interjections and broken phrases which are thick in 
the catastrophes. The beautiful, well-proportioned 
passages of Shakespeare are windows through 
which we may glance at the souls of his characters, 
but in the catastrophe we gaze almost without any 
medium into the depths of torn hearts. Students 
of literature can imitate the verbal eloquence of 
Shakespeare; they can learn words and appreciate 
the value of imagery, but they must throw up their 
hands in despair in presence of his chaotic elo- 
quence. Here they see that however wonderful 
the power of his speech, it is not worth considering 
in comparison with what may be called the power 
of his silence. It would be weakness for Shake- 
speare to elaborate language, however telling, in 
presence of an elemental passion at white heat. 

83 



84 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

And he has not that weakness. Artists of inferior 
calibre show their inferiority precisely in playing 
the rhetoricians in trying to express a thing which 
is above rhetoric. They would elaborate the ex- 
pression of a passion as they would elaborate the 
expression of a thought. They forget that the 
essential difference between thinking and feeling 
requires an essentially different method of expres- 
sion. I had often heard that Shakespeare was 
great. I accepted the estimate on faith and half- 
believed in his greatness: but when I came under 
the sway of his impassioned incoherence, then and 
then only did I know what the greatness of Shake- 
speare meant. I saw that others might be as rich in 
bnguage, as gorgeous in imagery, as lyrical, as 
happy in dialogue; might be his peer in twenty 
other ways; but he stood alone, beyond compari- 
son, in disclosing the mute depths of human pain. 
Nothing in the play of ''Othello," thick as it is 
with rushing passages, can bear comparison with 
"Desdemona, O Desdemona, O-O-O!" the line 
which reveals ineffable depths of Othello's misery. 
When Lady Macbeth closes the sleep-walking 
scene with *'0-0-0!" she has reached the climax 
of tragic expression. We catch a glimpse through 
that thrice-repeated interjection of a conscience 
seared unto anguish with remorse. In the ante- 
cedent lines she is in a sense mistress of her emo- 
tions. "Can all the perfumes of Arabia sweeten 
this little hand?" and ''Who would have thought 
the old man had so much blood in him?" These 
lines, awful though they be, are uttered by a human 
being who still walks and thinks, but in the end 



INARTICULATE ELOQUENCE 85 

a soul torn to shreds with agony is seen through 
shreds of speech. 

I may be permitted to make one more reference, 
to a Une in ''Lear," which has been accounted by 
at least one competent critic the best line in Shake- 
speare. It is composed of only one word, and that 
a short Saxon word, repeated five times: "Never, 
never, never, never, never!" Lear had solaced 
himself with the thought of having Cordelia with 
him to the end. Cordelia is hanged. In the midst 
of his sweet dream, her body is carried to him. His 
emotions at the sight are heartrending, mounting 
to the climax of piteousness in the realization that 
she would never more speak to him. 

Cordelia — "Shall we not see these daughters and these 
sisters?" 

Lear — "No, no, no, no ! Come, let's away to prison. 
We two alone will sing like birds in a cage : 
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down 
And ask of thee forgiveness; so we'll live, 
And pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh 
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues 

Talk of court-news ; we'll talk with them too 

and we'll wear out 
In a walled prison packs and sets of great ones 
That ebb and flow by the moon" — 

[Last scene. Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms.^ 

Lear — "Howl, howl, howl, howl! Oh, you are men of 
stones ! 
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so 
That heaven's vaults should crack — she's gone 
forever." 

****** 
"And my poor fool is hanged ! No, no, no life ! 
Thou'lt come no more? 
Never, never, never, never, never!" 



86 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

It is no wonder that the critic Tate cut away the 
last scene in **Lear." He saw that in all probabil- 
ity no actor of his time could mount to its level of 
passionate expression ; and the English Kean's 
claim to the honor of posterity rests in great part 
on his loathing of Tate's outrageous mutilation, on 
his restoration of the original and his masterful 
interpretation of the final passages of the play. 

Middling elocutionists can render the ringing 
lines of Shakespeare well, but only an artist of 
highest powers can interpret the unspeakable parts. 
Mrs. Siddons could do that. Her best interpreta- 
tion was that of Lady Macbeth, and her powers 
reached their acme in the sleep-walking scene. It 
is not surprising then that Reynolds had her sit for 
him when he painted his 'Tragedy." We should 
like to believe that Samuel Johnson began to un- 
derstand Shakespeare through her. This is not 
unlikely in view of the admiration which the old 
man felt for her and for the great painter's 
"Tragedy." 

Shakespeare suffers in the classroom in this re- 
spect that, as a rule, the best thing in him — his 
tremendous passionateness, revealed through frag- 
mentary utterances — is not and cannot be ade- 
quately explained ; and insistence on lesser dramatic 
factors leaves the impression that they are the sum 
total of his work. An explanation ought to be 
similar to the thing explained. Now the thing ex- 
plained in the best parts of Shakespearean tragedy 
is intense passion ; but the explanation of a teacher 
can hardly be tensely passionate. For teaching as 
an art is more intellectual than emotional. It re- 



INARTICULATE ELOQUENCE 87 

quires analysis, criticism, explanation in the teacher 
and tangible results in the pupils, all of which 
leaves little place for the rousing of his passions. 
And even should the teacher personally experience 
the passionate exaltations of Shakespearean trag- 
edy, his explanatory language, necessarily didactic, 
will not be a suitable means of conveyance to the 
minds of his scholars. Were he an actor, he could 
interpret instead of merely explaining. But even 
though his elocutionary powers be not of the high- 
est, he would do well to intersperse explanations 
with well prepared readings. 

However, a first-class actor can best teach Shake- 
speare. He may have no abstract ideas about the 
tragedies, he may be deficient in criticism, but he 
steeps his soul concretely in their spirit, and instead 
of expressing his own thoughts and impressions, 
he gives out the very plays themselves. How much 
we owe to the actors and actresses who have ren- 
dered Shakespeare well in past years ! Booth, Mary 
Anderson, Modjeska, Sothern and Marlowe, in our 
own memory, have interpreted many a scene which 
we could not have interpreted ourselves. And how 
lamentable the present decadence of the art of 
tragedy! Moving pictures can never supply its 
place. For, aside from the fact that they tend 
towards the spectacular and worse, they lack the 
human voice. They lack also that spiritual radi- 
ation which proceeds from living spiritual beings 
and which cannot be transferred along with fea- 
tures, form and motion, to a screen. May the ter- 
centenary of Shakespeare's death see a rebirth of 
tragedy on the stage! 



IX. THE ART, MORALITY AND EMO- 
TIONAL EFFECT OF TRAGEDY 

The objection has more than once been seriously 
urged that tragedy is not art because it is a presen- 
tation of the painful, calculated to arouse sorrow, 
whereas art essentially deals with the beautiful and 
tends to awaken a sense of the pleasurable. It is 
clear that the idea of art is realized in statuary, 
painting, architecture and most of the forms of lit- 
erature: but the embodiment of the idea of art in 
the tragedy is doubtful. The reasonableness of vis- 
iting an art-gallery to be pleased is apparent. The 
reasonableness of being present at a tragedy to be 
moved to tears needs explaining. 

The substance of the answer to the objection may 
be conveyed by the simple statement that tragedy 
also presents the beautiful and awakens the pleas- 
urable, but in a manner peculiar to itself. Tragedy 
sets suffering and death before us, 'tis true; but it 
reveals them in the persons of an amiable hero and 
heroine. The element of beauty required for art is 
embodied in him or her and that beauty is empha- 
sized by misfortune. The shadow of death brings 
out by contrast the brightness of the life that is 
being destroyed. There is no school for the devel- 
opment of genuine character like the school of suf- 
fering: for while suffering hardens mean souls as 
the sun hardens clay, it softens and refines great 
souls as the sun softens wax. Hamlet, Lear, Othello 
are better not indeed for their misdeeds, but for 
the pain which they endure for them. In no portion 
of their careers do these heroes make a more potent 

88 



THE ART OF TRAGEDY 89 

appeal to our love than in their finales. Out of the 
depths they radiate amiableness magnetically. The 
messenger's praise of Cawdor fits each of them: 
"Nothing in this life became him like the leaving it." 
At their worst, they are at their best. Their calami- 
ties illustrate and increase their high nobility. And 
what we say of heroes is even more emphatically 
true of heroines. 

Now, though the contemplation of their pain is 
painful to us, the sight of their heroic endurance 
evokes from our hearts sentiments of love and ad- 
miration. Love and admiration are pleasurable. 
But they are not always pleasurable in the sense of 
being comfortable. Love and admiration are com- 
fortable when those whom we love and admire are 
not only beautiful, but fortunate and happy. But 
love and admiration are uncomfortable to us when 
those whom we love are unfortunate and unhappy. 
Now, the possibility of simultaneously experiencing 
pain and pleasure has upon it a touch of the para- 
dox. It seems a contradiction in terms, but it is 
not. Indeed, the phrase, *'the pain of love," is cur- 
rent, perfectly intelligible to any one who has ex- 
perienced at one and the same moment the pleas- 
urable yet poignant thrill of love. 

Tragedy then is a form of art because it pre- 
sents beauty of character and evokes a sense of 
painful pleasure, pleasurable pain. 

But also the sorrow itself in tragedy is beautiful. 
For though sorrow taken by itself is repulsive, yet 
it has been so thoroughly identified in the history of 
humanity with the most lovable types of humanity 
that we have come to regard it also as lovable. The 



90 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

most representative of the children of men have 
been children of sorrow. As with a sombre cloak 
they have been enveloped in it. Therefore it has a 
borrowed splendor caught from the splendid men 
and women whom it has touched; just as faded and 
threadbare garments are more precious than cloth 
of gold to those who keep them as heirlooms in 
memory of the dear one who once wore them. 

Tragedy then is not only art, but it is one of the 
highest arts. For its appeal is not to the senses 
through sensuous beauty, but to the love of the soul 
through spiritual beauty in a repellant environment. 
Newman says that ''a face worn by tears and fast- 
ing loses its beauty." He could have added that it 
acquires a new beauty — the higher beauty of pathos. 
The face of tragedy draws us not with its high col- 
ors and contour, but with the expressive pallor and 
shadows of heroic endurance. Hence the little 
space devoted by Shakespeare to the description of 
a hero and heroine's personal appearance, and hence 
his supreme effort to portray their passion and 
death. 

MORALITY 

We can best approach the question of the morality 
of tragedy by considering two meanings of the 
phrase so often heard and seen in print: ''Art for 
art's sake." ''Art for art's sake" can mean the 
worthiness of art of being pursued without any re- 
gard for morality. The dictum taken in this sense 
is false ; for morality is higher than art and due re- 
gard must be had by the artist for morality in the 
pursuit of his art. If we were not moral beings art 



THE MORALITY OF TRAGEDY QI 

might engross our whole attention. But we must be 
moral; and hence our artistic ambitions must be 
made to fit in with moral obligations. But the ex- 
pression, ''Art for art's sake," has a second meaning 
which is admissable : i.e., we need not as artists play 
the part of moralists. We need not attach a lesson 
to every statue that we chisel. Our every painting 
need not be an illustration of the Ten Command- 
ments. Our poems need not embody the ideas of 
Faith. A sculptor may purpose merely to reveal a 
superb physique. A painter may aim at nothing 
more than setting forth the glory of a sunset. A 
poet may intend nothing more than to describe a 
particular phase of mind and heart. In other words, 
each art has an end special and internal to itself 
which may be pursued without explicitly aiming at 
any other end. 

But even in this second admissable sense ''art for 
art's sake" has no place in the art of tragedy. For 
it is of the essence of tragedy to be moral as well as 
artistic. For all writers of tragedy have had in 
mind the purpose of teaching the amiableness of vir- 
tue and the horror of crime. They illustrate in their 
villains and also to some extent in their heroes the 
punishment of wrong-doing ; and in their heroes and 
heroines they manifest human greatness, sweetness, 
patience in such alluring colors that a normal reader 
or spectator of tragedy can hardly resist the call to 
a nobler life. The king and queen in "Hamlet," 
lago, Edmund, Regan and Goneril are intended by 
the dramatist to make his readers hate and be afraid 
of vice: and Hamlet's love of rectitude, Othello's 
massive grandeurs, Brutus' unselfish devotion to the 



92 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

commonwealth, Lear's final love of Cordelia — these 
various qualities, admirable, though marred by de- 
fects, and more particularly the charming traits of 
the Shakespearean heroines are revealed with the 
purpose of rousing men and women from stale and 
flat mediocrity of life. 

I do not say that the poet's aim was formally be- 
fore his mind when he wrote, as a preacher's aim 
may be supposed to be formally before his mind 
when he speaks. It may have been there only sub- 
consciously, but it influenced him potently. 

To the question about tragic morality in another 
sense, a less favorable answer must be given. For 
tragedy by accident, not through any element in- 
trinsic to it, but rather through a misapprehension 
of the reader, can be the occasion of a mawkish 
preference of failure to success. There is something 
very enticing in the hero of a lost cause. In all 
tragedies the great and noble go down to ruin, the 
mediocre survive. A reader of Shakespeare's plays 
of English history sees great men succeeding and 
middling ones occupying their proper place. Suc- 
cess in itself is better than failure ; and in "Henry 
V," for instance, success is shown in splendid col- 
ors. But an exclusive reader of Shakespeare's trag- 
edies is so used to finding noble characters in defeat 
and mediocre ones on top, that he may gradually fall 
into the sentimental belief that defeat is amiable and 
that success is mediocre and vulgar. We rightly 
prefer the failing Hamlet to Fortinbras with his foot 
on the throne ; but, wrongly, we are inclined also to 
be partial to Hamlet's very failure and to under- 
value the very achievements of Fortinbras. 



THE MORALITY OF TRAGEDY 93 

The morality of Shakespeare in another sense of 
the word may be spoken of here. 

Shakespeare offends against moraHty by his vul- 
garities and obscenities. The wonder however is 
that he was not worse. The age was not delicate. 
A glance at the other Elizabethan dramatists shows 
in what excesses their pens indulged. He was more 
careful than they. Moreover, his offensiveness is 
not half so dangerous as the silken insidiousness of 
many a lascivious modern. Besides, he never de- 
liberately attacked fundamental laws of morality, as 
many moderns do. He was lacking in delicacy, but 
he was not irreverent. Again, vice is exhibited in 
his tragedies not for itself, but to illustrate con- 
trastingly the beauty of virtue: or for some other 
noble tragic effect. I do not say that the end justi- 
fies the means ; but it is well to remember that the 
vicious things are only means to a noble end. Other 
representations in the plays are not bad, but only 
unbecoming for youthful eyes. 

When all has been said however, it must be 
granted that the reading of Shakespeare is fraught 
with danger. Indiscriminate reading will harm at 
least the young. How some teachers can allow and 
oblige boys and girls together in the class-room to 
read aloud certain passages is difficult to understand. 
Modesty is sorely tried, indelicacies are emphasized 
and trains of unhealthy reflections are started by 
such an obliviousness of youthful susceptibilities. 
The mature teacher may perhaps be immune ; but his 
feelings are no criterion for judging the emotional 
attitude of his charges. Original sin and its pas- 
sionate effects are facts accepted by all Christians. 



94 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

Platonic indifference of feeling is only a pleasant 
dream. The study of poetry may easily deteriorate 
into the study and practice of sensuality. For as 
there is only a step from the sublime to the ridicu- 
lous, so there is only a step from aestheticism to 
hedonism. 

But with proper precautions the risk of reading 
Shakespeare in schools and colleges may be taken. 
He is the glory of our literature, and a circle of 
studies without him is like a ring without its jewel. 
He is the interpreter of life, and those who are 
going into it would do well to sit for a time at his 
knees. 

EMOTIONAL EFFECT 

Another interesting question which has been 
asked about the influence of tragedy is whether 
the sense of sorrow aroused in a spectator or read- 
er's heart by the catastrophe is real or only ar- 
tistic. The view has been expressed that as the mis- 
fortunes of tragic characters are not real but 
feigned, therefore our sympathy for them cannot 
be real but must be only feigned. Now it is clear 
to me that the sentiments in question are as real as 
the sorrows of actual life, and the argument to the 
contrary is fallacious. 'Tis true a tragedy is a 
presentation of imaginary griefs, but the highest 
art of the dramatist consists precisely in concealing 
the imaginary character of those griefs. The mo- 
ment he permits his audience to advert to the fact 
of feigning, the charm is broken, the magical wand 
of tragedy is snapped. He might as well ring down 
the curtain on his play. There is no more poetry 



EMOTIONAL EFFECT OF TRAGEDY 95 

in the air. The audience is rationalized again; the 
bands of enchantment have been loosened from 
their mind, and they are free to sit and gaze and 
speculate and criticize unmoved. But if a trage- 
dian has the power of magnetizing the mind and 
holding it entranced to the end, every scene and 
action of the play makes an appeal as potent as if it 
were real. In such a case we do not positively say 
to ourselves that we are witnessing facts, for this 
would be untrue, and no genuine art can be built 
on an untruth. But neither do we say to ourselves 
that the action of the play is fictitious; we simply 
do not advert to its fictional character. To us it 
has all the seeming of actuality, and this is sufficient 
to arouse in our hearts an emotion that is actual. 

The emotion, it is true, is not as permanent as it 
is when in real life our hearts are pierced with some 
shaft of distress. For, after the mystic spell of a 
play is broken we are free to lay the comforting 
unction to our soul that all is well with us, whereas 
the first shock of a real misfortune is intensified by 
the reflex and positive conviction of its reality. 
Nor is the emotion as keen as in real life. For in a 
theatre the sufferer is not as near to us as, for 
instance, a dying relative or friend. There is no 
question of personal loss to us. A sort of domestic 
selfisnness of love is not appealed to. But for all 
that, the emotion can be and is real. Nor can the 
point be urged that the masterfulness of dramatic 
presentation and the poetic beautifying of a painful 
theme please instead of paining. For, aside from 
the fact that we become clearly conscious of dra- 
matic masterfulness and beauty only afterwards on 



96 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 

reflection, when the glow of poetry in our minds 
has yielded to the discriminating light of criticism, 
our partial consciousness during the progress of 
the play of its artistic handling lessens but by no 
means completely dissipates the real sense of sym- 
pathy which affects us. 

And finally even though a rift in the play per- 
mitted us to see that the dramatist behind it is only 
feigning, sufficient motive would still remain for 
genuine compassion. For tragedy is a replica of 
real life. Its characters are shadows of reality; its 
catastrophes have been endured and are being en- 
dured too truly under the sun to-day; its loves and 
hatreds and deep despairs, its crushed hopes and 
bright prospects extinguished are daily experiences 
among men and women in the valley of tears. And 
as these are our brothers and sisters in a common 
humanity, we may well sympathize with them really 
in their unreal representatives upon the stage. 



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